Traveling Selves: Creating the Pilgrim Persona
Sponsoring Organization(s)
Special Session
Organizer Name
Suzanne Yeager
Organizer Affiliation
Fordham Univ.
Presider Name
Anthony Bale
Presider Affiliation
Birkbeck College, Univ. of London
Paper Title 1
The Journey of Rabbi Petahia: A Medieval Jewish Pilgrim's Persona
Presenter 1 Name
Shamma Boyarin
Presenter 1 Affiliation
Univ. of Victoria
Paper Title 2
Passing as Pilgrims: The Place of Crusading in a Poetics of Pilgrimage
Presenter 2 Name
Suzanne Yeager
Paper Title 3
The Note-Taker as Hero
Presenter 3 Name
Shayne Aaron Legassie
Presenter 3 Affiliation
Univ. of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Start Date
15-5-2015 1:30 PM
Session Location
Fetzer 1060
Description
Travelling Selves: Creating the Pilgrim Persona
Organized by Suzanne Yeager (Fordham University) and Anthony Bale (Birkbeck, University of London)
This session offers three papers that explore pilgrim identity by querying the use of narrative voice and the creation of “traveling” personae. Shamma Boyarin’s “The Journey of Rabbi Petahia: A Medieval Jewish Pilgrim’s Persona,” examines Petachia’s complex authorial voice, showing descriptive methods and choices influenced by Petachia’s position as a male Ashkenazi Jew and his connection to Rhineland Jewish mysticism. In “Passing as Pilgrims: The Place of Crusading in a Poetics of Pilgrimage,” Suzanne Yeager explores pilgrim writers' habits of creating associations with influential crusading narratives; through these complex relationships with past events, Yeager illustrates the porous nature of pilgrimage and crusading travel genres. Shayne Legassi, in “Note-taker as Hero,” brings to light the watershed changes of paper technologies on the role of pilgrim writing, and the ways in which this new accessibility dramatically changed the portrayal of the pilgrim persona.
By focusing on the narrative voice of the pilgrim, we hope to uncover the important role of the traveler as he or she crafted his or her persona, and to interpret pilgrim narrative as a way of producing the self which blended aspects of personal biography, the souvenir, lived experience, authoritative cultural narratives, intertextuality, scribal culture, intermedial productions, and other strategies. We hope that our session will invite our colleagues to join us in exploring whether or not the pilgrim’s identity mattered in the account, and under what, if any, conditions.
-Suzanne Yeager
Traveling Selves: Creating the Pilgrim Persona
Fetzer 1060
Travelling Selves: Creating the Pilgrim Persona
Organized by Suzanne Yeager (Fordham University) and Anthony Bale (Birkbeck, University of London)
This session offers three papers that explore pilgrim identity by querying the use of narrative voice and the creation of “traveling” personae. Shamma Boyarin’s “The Journey of Rabbi Petahia: A Medieval Jewish Pilgrim’s Persona,” examines Petachia’s complex authorial voice, showing descriptive methods and choices influenced by Petachia’s position as a male Ashkenazi Jew and his connection to Rhineland Jewish mysticism. In “Passing as Pilgrims: The Place of Crusading in a Poetics of Pilgrimage,” Suzanne Yeager explores pilgrim writers' habits of creating associations with influential crusading narratives; through these complex relationships with past events, Yeager illustrates the porous nature of pilgrimage and crusading travel genres. Shayne Legassi, in “Note-taker as Hero,” brings to light the watershed changes of paper technologies on the role of pilgrim writing, and the ways in which this new accessibility dramatically changed the portrayal of the pilgrim persona.
By focusing on the narrative voice of the pilgrim, we hope to uncover the important role of the traveler as he or she crafted his or her persona, and to interpret pilgrim narrative as a way of producing the self which blended aspects of personal biography, the souvenir, lived experience, authoritative cultural narratives, intertextuality, scribal culture, intermedial productions, and other strategies. We hope that our session will invite our colleagues to join us in exploring whether or not the pilgrim’s identity mattered in the account, and under what, if any, conditions.
-Suzanne Yeager