Pilgrimage may have been seen as a morally healthy activity – but when women strayed from home, they were often treated with suspicion and scorn, writes Marion Turner in this extract from her new book The Wife of Bath: A Biography

One of the most extravagant details about the Wife of Bath, in her General Prologue portrait, is her travel history:

And thries hadde she been at Jerusalem;
She hadde passed many a straunge strem;
At Rome she hadde been, and at Boloigne,
In Galice at Seint-Jame, and at Coloigne.
She koude muchel of wandrynge by the weye (463–467)

Now on a relatively local pilgrimage to Canterbury, in the past she has been three times to Jerusalem, as well as visiting Rome, Boulogne, Santiago de Compostela, and Cologne. Like everything else about Alison, the extent of her travels seems excessive and opulent, but it is not incredible: in the 15th century William Wey, an English traveller and cleric, went twice to Jerusalem, taking in Rome on the first of those trips, and he also journeyed to Santiago, recording his experiences in itineraries.

But a woman engaging in many pilgrimages attracted a particular kind of attention – Alison’s extensive travelling is a metaphor for her adventurous and unconventional attitudes more generally. When Chaucer tells us that she knew a great deal “of wandrynge by the weye,” he suggests that her wandering is not only literal: she deviates from the expected paths; she won’t do what men want her to do. The word “wander” suggests errancy, and harks back to Augustine’s depiction of people on earth as “peregrini” (wanderers), straying away from God, who need to focus on the kingdom of heaven, not the distractions of the journey.

This unease around the idea of the wanderer was intensified in the rhetoric surrounding female travellers. Indeed, there was a long tradition of regarding with suspicion women who did not stay at home. The key source for the idea of the wandering woman is Proverbs 7, which describes the errant harlot as “talkative and wandering [vaga], not bearing to be quiet, not able to abide still at home” (10–11). In later medieval texts, the wandering woman is specifically depicted as a pilgrim, someone who (in Lydgate’s words) seeks many pilgrimages “To kys no shrynes, but lusty yong images.”

By the later Middle Ages, pilgrimage was a hugely popular activity across Europe, and large numbers of women did travel to shrines, both local and more distant. While going on pilgrimage was arduous, expensive, and sometimes dangerous, it also presented opportunities that were hard to find at home.

There is a good example of this in the late-medieval poem, “The Good Wyfe Wold a Pylgremage”, in which a mother who is about to set off on “pylgremage unto þe holly londe” gives advice to her daughter on how to behave. She exhorts her daughter: “When I am out of þe toun, loke that þou be wyse, / And rene þou not fro hous to house lyke an Antyny gryce”. A “gryce” is a piglet, and an “Antyny” or “Tantony” pig is the smallest pig of the litter. In this couplet, she juxtaposes two different modes of female behaviour: she herself can travel thousands of miles, leave her home, journey right across Europe and over to the Holy Land – but her daughter, staying in her community, should not even go from house to house. That kind of local wandering is compared to the behaviour of an uncontained little piglet – but the speaker sees no contradiction in advising her daughter to stay within very narrow confines while she herself traverses the globe. Pilgrimage, as (in theory at least) religiously motivated teleological travel, offered a way of expanding women’s horizons.

Male pilgrims did not always welcome this. In a 15th-century account of his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Brother Felix Fabri comments with admiration on the bravery of the old pilgrim women whom he met in Venice, while pointing out that the younger male pilgrims despised them:

certain women well-stricken in years, wealthy matrons, six in number, were there together with us, desiring to cross the sea to the holy places. I was astonished at the courage of these old women, who through old age were scarcely able to support their own weight, yet forgot their own frailty, and through love for the Holy Land joined themselves to young knights and underwent the labours of strong men. The proud nobles, however, were not pleased at this, and thought that they would not embark in the ship in which these ladies were to go, considering it a disgrace that they should go to receive the honour of knighthood in company with old women.

These aristocratic male pilgrims try to persuade all the other travellers to refuse to go in the same ship as the old women, but others oppose them, so that ultimately the aggressive men depart, and the women travel on in the same company as Fabri. He later tells us that on the ships, women pilgrims do not come to the common table, but eat and sleep in their berths, separated from the men who can move more freely about the ship. Later in his book, Fabri compares their admirable behaviour with the actions of a female pilgrim of whom he disapproves – on the grounds that she is curious, noisy, and, most inappropriately, “ran hither and thither incessantly” and was “restless”.

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