Art historian walks into the Middle Ages
Top photo: Kirk Ambrose on the trail. (All photos courtesy Kirk Ambrose)
Boulder Professor Kirk Ambrose set out to better understand art, doubt and medieval pilgrimages, but his 800-mile walk has modern implications
At some point during his trek, Kirk Ambrose felt that walking was “too fast.” Days stretched and the small loomed large. He and his wife would stopto admirea spider, then just talk about it.
“It really did change my perceptions,” he says. And that was kind of the point.
Kirk Ambrose (right), a Boulder professor of classics, walked nearly 800miles along medieval pilgrimage routes, joined for part of the journey by his wife, Kim Dickey, a professor of art and art history. (Photo: Kirk Ambrose)
Last summer, Ambrose, a professor of classics at the University of Colorado Boulder,walkednearly 800miles along medieval pilgrimage routes—much of it on theVia Jacobi, the Way of St. James, which threads through France toward Santiago de Compostela in Spain. His wife, Kim Dickey, who is a Boulder professor of ceramics, joined him for part of the walk.
Ambrose trained for the trek, but the goal was not athletic. It was scholarly. The long walk served as research for a book he’s writing about art and doubt in the 11th and 12th centuries.
“I wanted to get a sense of, as much as is possible in the modern day, what these experiences were like,” he says. “Pilgrimage has been a framework for understanding medieval art—especially the 12th century—and I wanted to probe that from the ground.”
He approached the journey with “a healthy dose of skepticism.” The romantic picture of pilgrims dutifully trudging from shrine to shrine, he argues, owes much to early 20th‑century American portrayals of pilgrimages.
Ambrose cites Arthur Kingsley Porter, a wealthy American scholar who toured Europe by chauffeured Rolls‑Royce and helped popularize the idea of being on the road as a way to understand the spread of medievalart. Porter’s writings reflected a privileged and American way of moving through the world, Ambrose suggests, adding that Porter’s perspectives differed from those of most Europeans.
The road and its surroundings
The walk itself focused Ambrose’s attention on the social fabric that makes pilgrimages possible. “What interested me, perhaps more than the pilgrim, was the whole support network,” he said. He met volunteers who cleaned bathrooms and retirees who opened bedrooms—chambresd’hôtes—and cooked dinner for strangers.
Many of these workers had left urban careers after the pandemic, moved by a desire to be close to a journey even if they could not make one themselves. “Again andagain,I heard a version of the same idea: ‘I travel through the people I encounter, even though I’m staying in the same spot.’”
The observation seemed timeless. Medieval monks, often prohibited from physical travel, were encouraged to undertake “spiritual pilgrimages”—imagined journeys toward the divine. The modern hosts Ambrose met felt like their analogues, he said.
Ambrosetrained fora year—backpack full of books—before setting out; he finished the walk in just over two months without a blister. But the physical feat was secondary.
One observation about pilgrimages, he says, is “how much time you are not in churches.” Most days were focused on ferns, salamanders, hunger and thelogisticsof the next bed. Sacred sites punctuated but did not define the experience.
Scholarship in motion
Kirk Ambrose's journey took him along Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. (Photo: Kirk Ambrose)
Some scholars have argued that artistic styles spread via pilgrimhighways. Ambrose suggests otherwise.
“There’san increasing body of scholarship that challenges the idea that artists simply ‘followed’ pilgrims,” he says. “Institutional affiliation and alliances often explain transmission better—monasteries, chapters, reform movements—networks that stretch across regions through personal relationships, not roads.”
The variety heencounteredalong the way—the “dizzying” mix of styles and architectural solutions—underscored that point.
He offers a contemporary analogy: Rather than assuming ideas spread evenly across a state, think of a university department with deep ties to a lab in the Netherlands—ideas may travel faster via that friendship than along any map. The medieval equivalents—papal circles, Cluniac reform, houses of canons—made and remade aesthetic choices at large scale and across geography.
Ambrose also questions the notion of the Middle Ages as just an “Age of Faith.”
“I’m trying to complicate the emotional landscape,” he says. “Doubt is a primary motivator.” In the 12th century, commentaries on the Book of Job—which wrestles with faith and doubt—were among the most copied texts.
Ambrose notes that art from this period confronts doubt, raising questions such as: Which relic is genuine? Is the Eucharistliterally thebody of Christ or a symbol? What do I treat as true whenI’msurrounded by competing claims?
Even images of damnation—liarspunished,tongues ripped out—suggest a culture trying to distinguish fact from fiction. Today, humans face similar questions, he observes.
Ambrose speaks with delight about the people he met on the walk. “There’s a saying on the route that the kingdom of pilgrimage is2,000 mileslong and 5 feet wide,” he says. On that path, one might find an octogenarian walking from Budapest to Santiago—eight or nine months out and back—or a group of students between semesters, or a CEO on sabbatical. Most of the walkers he metweren’treligious.
He says the experience evoked what cultural anthropologist Victor Turner called the liminal experience—aphase between two stages of life, states of being or locations. “I met people from18to their 70s. We were all pilgrims together, regardless of motivation.”
Scenes from a (very long) walk
St.-Privat-d’Allier in France.
A fire salamander on the trail near Espalion, France.
The rooftops of Ste.-Foy, Conques in France.
Lungerersee in Switzerland.
View of Fribourg, Switzerland.
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