On Pilgrimage: - 'Anglicans, Remembrance and Pilgrimage after the First World War'

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Abstract

In response to the scale of wartime mortality, the aftermath of the First World War saw a dramatic and spontaneous increase in the language and practice of pilgrimage in Great Britain. No longer, for Protestants, primarily a metaphor for the Christian journey, pilgrimage was resurgent, being closely identified with the battlefields and cemeteries of the Western and other Fronts, the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey, the Cenotaph at Whitehall, and countless local war memorials across Great Britain and the Dominions. Representing the largest Christian tradition in the British Empire, this contribution considers the rise of war-related pilgrimage among Anglicans in Great Britain and across the English-speaking world, from the great pilgrimage centres of the Western Front to the local memorials and regimental chapels that filled and adorned Anglican churches in the inter-war years.

Michael Snape (PhD, University of Birmingham, 1994) is a lay ecumenical Canon of Durham Cathedral and Durham University’s inaugural Michael Ramsey Professor of Anglican Studies. His research focuses on Christianity and conflict in the English-speaking world from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. His next monograph, ‘A Church Militant: Anglicans and the Armed Forces from Queen Victoria to the Vietnam War’, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2022.