di Giovine and Picard (eds), “The Seductions of Pilgrimage”

Di Giovine, Michael A. and David Picard, eds. 2015. The Seductions of Pilgrimage: Sacred Journeys Afar and Astray in the Western Religious Tradition. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.

Publisher’s Description: The Seductions of Pilgrimage explores the simultaneously attractive and repellent, beguiling and alluring forms of seduction in pilgrimage. It focuses on the varied discursive, imaginative, and practical mechanisms of seduction that draw individual pilgrims to a pilgrimage site; the objects, places, and paradigms that pilgrims leave behind as they embark on their hyper-meaningful travel experience; and the often unforeseen elements that lead pilgrims off their desired course. Presenting the first comprehensive study of the role of seduction on individual pilgrims in the study of pilgrimage and tourism, it will appeal to scholars of anthropology, cultural geography, tourism, heritage, and religious studies.

Contents:

Foreword, Jas’ Elsner

Introduction: pilgrimage and seduction in the Abrahamic tradition, Michael A. Di Giovine and David Picard

Purity as danger? Seduction and sexuality at Walsingham, Simon Coleman

The seductions of guiding: Jewish-Israeli tour guides on the Christian Holy Land pilgrimage, Jackie Feldman

As if the road there is covered with honey’: inquiries into the seductiveness of a Greek orthodox monastery in Arizona for Russian orthodox parish pilgrims, Julia Klimova

The seductiveness of saints: interreligious pilgrimage sites in Hatay and the ritual transformations of agency, Jens Kreinath

The seduction of the past in new age pilgrimage, Jill Dubisch

Seduction in the ‘Gypsy pilgrimage’ at Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, Ellen Badone

Seductions of suffering: stigmata, salvation and pilgrimage to the sanctuary of St. Padre Pio in San Giovanni Rotondo, Michael A. Di Giovine

The seductions of the way: the return of the pilgrim and the road to Compostela as a liminal space, Eduardo Chemin

Up In God’s great cathedral’: evangelism, astronauts, and the seductiveness of outer space, Deana L. Weibel