The Rome of Two Northern Pilgrims: Archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury and Abbot Nikolás of Munkathverá

• Published in: Harvard Theological Review
• Main Author: Magoun, Francis Peabody
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge University Press (CUP) 1940
• Subjects: Religious studies; Munkaþverá; Iceland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0017816000018782; https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0017816000018782

The pilgrim-diaries associated with Sigeric, archbishop of Canterbury (990–994), and Nikolás, abbot of the Benedictine monastery at Munkaþverá, Iceland (1155–1159), commend themselves to historians of ecclesiastical Rome on more than one count. Both diaries include itineraries unusually detailed for their periods and in this regard are unique for the countries of origin and valuable in regard to the history of the regions traversed. More than this, and of particular moment for the historian of the medieval Church, both diaries devote considerable attention to sights seen in the Eternal City. Here these little works offer a welcome, in a sense intimate, view of Rome of the periods in question; for they tell us one very important thing that the medieval Baedekers do not, namely, just what two individuals elected to see or were shown or, equally significant, what two men chose to note down or especially remembered in the course of their tour of the city. The English diary with its systematic list of Roman churches — the titles often in a dubious Latin (see the individual items, especially pp. 275–276 below) — furnishes us, furthermore, with a little catalogue that, coming between the list of Leo III (806) and the list that the papal chamberlain Cencio Savelli (later Pope Honorius III) compiled in 1192, fills an obvious gap. The Icelandic diary, though less important in this regard, gains in interest by including a number of secular monuments and considerable detail about the churches, wanting in the English work. Both texts are worthy of more study than has been devoted to them.