Pilgrim Stories: On and Off the Road to Santiago

Nancy Louise Frey is an anthropologist, and this University of California Press book is her ethnographic study of modern pilgrims walking the Camino de Santiago, based on fieldwork actually conducted with contemporary pilgrims on the route rather than a historical study of medieval pilgrimage. Its strength is direct fieldwork engagement with why people actually walk the Camino today and what the experience means to them, capturing a living, actively growing practice rather than treating pilgrimage as a purely historical phenomenon. Its limit is that it documents modern pilgrim experience specifically, at the time of Frey's fieldwork, so a claim about the medieval origins of the Camino de Santiago or its formal Catholic theology of pilgrimage needs a source focused on that historical and doctrinal material rather than this study of contemporary practice.