Time Travel Middle Ages

Brian M. Fagan is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he has taught since 1967. Born in England, Dr. Fagan earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in archaeology and anthropology from Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Professor Fagan’s excavations in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) from 1959-1965 earned him recognition as a pioneer of multidisciplinary African history. He has served as Director of the Bantu Studies Project of the British Institute for Eastern Africa, Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana, and Visiting Professor at Whittier College and the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Professor Fagan is the recipient of a Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California at Santa Barbara. His other awards include the Public Service Award of the Society of Professional Archaeologists and the Public Education Award of the Society for American Archaeology. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1973.

Dr. Fagan’s many books include People of the Earth and In the Beginning, two widely used university and college textbooks in archaeology and prehistory. His other works include The Rape of the Nile, The Adventure of Archaeology, and The Little Ice Age. He also edited The Oxford Companion to Archaeology…

In the Middle Ages, enormous numbers of people went on pilgrimage. The village of Wilsnack with a population of only 1,000 swelled when 100,000 pilgrims arrived every year. On one day in 1392, residents counted the incoming pilgrims at Munich by dropping peas into a bowl, with an ultimate total of 40,000. In 1492, Aachen welcomed 142,000 eager pilgrims into their city in a single day. Obviously pilgrimage was a significant medieval social event, which found favor among both the elite and the greater populace. We define pilgrimage as travel by to visit a holy site, over long or short distances. Even when the travel occurred in the mind alone—all modes were perceived as pilgrimage at one time or place or another, in the later Middle Ages.