The Pilgrim-Writer: The transformative potential of the language arts and pilgrimage – an embodied investigation of self, drawing on theory and practice, including my own direct experience of contemporary pilgrimage and ‘languaging’.

This thesis explores the transformative potential of the language arts and pilgrimage. The writer presents an embodied investigation of herself, drawing on theories of pilgrimage and writing, and her own direct experience of identifying as a pilgrim-writer. The thesis is firmly located in Canterbury, a historic and contemporary pilgrimage centre, and home to Canterbury Christ Church University, on the site of the Anglo-Saxon St Augustine’s Abbey, and uses the Via Francigena, a pilgrimage route from Canterbury to Rome first documented in the tenth century as an example of a historical pilgrim route in contemporary use.

Making a direct connection between the specific and material, and the esoteric and spiritual is a theme of the thesis. Setting pilgrimage in context of pre-modern, post-modern and contemporary practice, she examines notions of healing, ritual, transformation, transcendence, deep ecology and modern gnosis as mechanisms for personal change.

As well as drawing on her own experience, she interrogates five published pilgrimage memoirs of the Via Francigena as exemplars of narratives of personal transformation through pilgrimage. She explores memoir alongside other kinds of
personal writing such as diaries, journals, poetry and fiction, as documents of transformation.