Preaching and teaching : the Codex Rustici as confused pilgrimage tale

Certain types of writing do not lend themselves to rigid plans or linear description; the earliest accounts written by pilgrims of their holy journeys, however, are structured lists of the sites visited. The Itinerarium Burdigalense is one of the first surviving accounts; dating from AD 333, twenty years after Constantine's legitimization of Christianity encouraged and enabled believers to follow his and his mother's example of touring the holy sites, the Itinerarium is essentially a list of the sites visited by an anonymous French pilgrim to Jerusalem. Such a document functions as a prescriptive guide, one which sets up the most important sites and implies that prospective pilgrims should visit them. With the development of the genre, however, longer and personalized accounts of pilgrimages begin to be composed, fleshed out with descriptions of the pleasures and difficulties of such a journey. These accounts are frequently and clearly didactic: their stated purpose is to encourage and instruct the future pilgrim, including those making an itinerarium mentis in Deum