Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage

Pilgrimages—real and imagined—are always popular, sometimes compulsory. Bodh Gaya, Santiago, Mecca, Jerusalem, and Puri are a few of the sites that beckon. The pilgrimage to the authentic self takes a similar path in an interior landscape. In the 15th century, Felix Fabri combined the two, using his visits to Jerusalem to write a handbook for nuns wanting to make a pilgrimage in the imagination, whilst confined to their religious houses. For Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage, the authors followed Fabri’s example. First they walked together over many weeks, not to reach a destination but simply to find one. Then, in startling words and images, along lanes and around hills, into caves and down to the coast. Over the course of the 19-day Armchair Pilgrimage, they invite the reader to experience the world around them just as they did as they walked. 

John Schott is a photographer, filmmaker and academic. In 1975, he received an Individual Artist’s Fellowship in Photography from the National Endowment for the Arts. Dr. Phil Smith has written more than 100 plays for companies including St Petersburg State Comedy Theatre, Opera North, and Perpetual Motion, and he is dramaturg with TNT (Munich). He is Assoc.Prof. at the U. of Plymouth and a visiting lecturer at the U. of Exeter. Tony Whitehead is a noted author and ornithologist.