In early modern Europe, as in many other places and times, the physical crossroads has been regarded as a site of the highest significance. It is a singular phenomenon that something as commonplace as a road junction should have exercised and excited the human imagination to the extent that it has throughout recorded history. As a reification of the hopes and dreams of a species whose existence is predicated on movement, however, the appeal of the crossroads which has persisted in our cultural sympathies for thousands of years might be obvious. Throughout literary and religious history, from the earliest of recorded times, human life has been imagined and memorialised as a journey, on both the level of the individual and the community. Perhaps because of this, the significance of the parting of roads seems to be similarly venerable. Crossroads may have been revered initially as both a literal place of momentous choice of direction and as a simple motif for other significant moments of decision taken along the way. The choice of the right road, both literally and metaphorically, has been an obvious concern of the traveller throughout time, as has been most notably expressed for the modern age in Robert Frost's poem ‘The Road not Taken’ (1916), that describes the experience memorably, just as it expresses some ambiguity over the outcomes of that fateful choice: ‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – / I took the one less traveled by’. Although this particular Y-shaped crossroads offered the speaker a choice whose significance was not directly obvious, it nevertheless ‘made all the difference’.

The persistence of the crossroads experience in human societies seems to be connected with the perseverance of the life-narrative metaphor of the road. For the last few thousand years, from the earliest narrative writing onwards in the West at least, this has taken on an epic dimension in its memorialisation and metaphorisation of human experience.