The Tyburn Tree: Catholic pilgrimages in Protestant London in the 17th c.
The religious culture of the English Catholic community was transformed in the 16th-17th cc. and a local Catholic culture emerged, in many ways different from the model prescribed by the Tridentine norms. One reason for that divergence was the loss of traditional sacred loci - churches, monasteries, shrines etc. during the years of the Reformation. In the post-Reformation period, English Catholics were to re-interpret the sacred geography of the country, and of its capital. The article looks into one aspect of this process - the emergence of new pilgrimage sites. A new sacral locus (which sacred status for long time was been a subject of conflict) appeared in London. That was Tyburn - the dishonorable place where traitors had been executed since the 12th c., and a site, which Catholics begun to see in late 16th early 17th cc. as a place of martyrdom, and, consequently, a pilgrimage destination. The author discusses pilgrimage the forms of pilgrimages that existed in conditions of a complete ban on the practice itself (since 1559), their political and religious contexts, as well as particular ways to describe pilgrimages to Tyburn. It is concluded that a small number oof references to such pilgrimages can be explained both by the character of the religious culture of the English Catholics as a minority culture, which used public gestures sparingly, and by conscious efforts at editing of the texts produced by Catholic missionaries. The latter could not control the laity’s devotional practices, but could instead define the image of England’s Catholic culture and its practices that was seen by contemporaries and descendants.