This article traces the deployment of the 14th century devotional treatise, The Meditationes Vitae Christi, in late medieval and early modern England. Beginning with a discussion of Nicholas Love’s 1409 translation of the treatise, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, the article examines how later editors and redactors reshape the treatise for new audiences. Not only does Love’s treatise have a lively print history after the introduction of the printing press, but the later editions by Caxton, de Worde, and Richard Pynson were faithful reproductions of Love’s translation. By the seventeenth century, however, the treatise underwent some drastic revisions under the hands of Charles Boscard and John Heigham. This article presents some much-needed attention to Heigham’s 1622 re-presentation of the text as The Life of Our Blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. In reworking this treatise for a much later audience, Heigham deftly combines material from both the Meditationes Vitae Christi and The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, while also making some interesting additions of his own.

This article analyses the cross-carrying pilgrimages to Vézelay and Walsingham, staged between 1946 and 1948. These were aimed at achieving peace, penance, and reconciliation at a time when communism was on the rise, there were fears that war would return, and the nuclear threat was real. Encompassing several contingents (or Stations), these religious post-war Catholic pilgrimages stand in contrast to the ‘secular’ pilgrimages to battlefields and cemeteries after 1918. Yet they retained a strong military element because of the substantial involvement of veterans, and their organisation, leadership and articulation. This article argues that the pilgrimages gave veteran pilgrims a chance to continue their service in the form of direct spiritual action, utilising their wartime experiences in the context of pilgrimage in order to conduct these physically challenging journeys. It will also explore the wider aims of atoning for wartime actions, and the ways in which the pilgrims were received by the communities they passed through. Whilst ultimately unsustainable due to their novelty and complexity, they laid a foundation for military-penitential pilgrimages, provided an outlet for spiritual and worldly concerns, and presented Catholics (especially in Britain) in a positive light in the years immediately after the Second World War.