FREDERIKA BREMER: PROTESTANTISK PILGRIM I PALESTINA ÅR 1859

Abstract

Pilgrimage Studies is a growing field of research; however, Protestant pilgrims in the 19th century have so far received little attention. Fredrika Bremer (1801–1865), world-famous Swedish author at the time, published an account of her five months in the Holy Land in 1859, in the travel book Life in the Old World (1860–1862), covering Switzerland, Italy, Turkey and Greece apart from Palestine. Throughout the narrative of the Biblical lands, Bremer discusses the significance of pilgrimage in relation to pilgrims of other Christian denominations. As a Protestant, she needs to ask herself in what way the physical place, the materiality of the holy sites, carries a meaning. In applying Charles Lock’s concept “the Protestant optic”, the analysis shows that Bremer concur with British and American Protestant pilgrims of her time in preferring landscapes to monuments and in complaining about the emotional expressions of devotion by Catholic and Orthodox pilgrims. Nevertheless, she also diverges from their standing on devotional practices. Her own critical method of making sense of holy sites results in what I call “allegorical geography”: she understands the inner meaning of the Gospel to be inscribed into the topography. Ultimately, in Bremer’s travel account, the pilgrimage is motivated, I suggest, by the aesthetic impression of the landscape, the sensuous perception that gives evidence to the truth of the Bible.