In the Middle Ages, the concept of waste as understood in Western culture significantly developed in textured ways.1 Though stemming from the category of waste, both dirt in which pilgrimage paths sprang up and dirt used as healing relic were integral aspects of pilgrimage ecopoetics. Pilgrimage as a practice suggests an ideal crucible for exploring interspecies interaction across both landscape and textscape. Dirt acts as an element in historical pilgrimage: pilgrims caused erosion on unpaved paths and affected environments in negative ways. Roadways became polluted and authorities insisted they be cleaned up to allow for clear passage. Some medieval miracle stories attest to the belief that dirt sparked healing, reminding us how ‘many soils have human stories attached to them’ (Lines-Kelly, 2004: 6). The converse is true as well: humans have many soil stories attached to them.

Pilgrimage functions as a human endeavor throughout multiple cultures. Just as beavers’ dam building is ‘as much a part of the phenotypic expression of beavers’ genes as are their webbed feet or wood-cutting teeth’ (Egan, 2015: 48), pilgrimage functions as a phenotypic structure inherent to humans. Humans feel compelled to seek their way in the world, whether journeying to obtain food, mates, and trade opportunities or for the purposes of religious ritual. Indeed, ‘[H]uman cognitive predispositions support our wayfinding, knowledge-seeking, and highly social nature, having evolved to solve environmental challenges in our evolutionary past’ (Easterlin, 2010: 262–3). Seen in this light, pilgrimage is not merely the propulsion of one human actor along a road or path to a perceived sacred space for the purposes of healing or spiritual devotion, as in the ideal[ized] understanding of religious pilgrimage. Predisposed to understand where we are and where we are headed, human beings are natural wayfarers, fashioning narrative to ‘secur[e] in memory events from the past, including memories of those nonhuman beings’ we interact with (Morrison, 2018). The lived practice of pilgrimage necessitates the interaction between humans and non-human actors, whether nettles, rocks, or dirt, each of which has intrinsic value (Riordan, 2004: 46).

I can attest to this lived pilgrimage practice. In 1994, my husband and I undertook the entire 137-mile Pilgrims’ Way from Winchester to Canterbury. At Winchester Cathedral, the porter served us ‘Wayfarer’s Dole’ (bread and ale), even bringing out a fourteenth-century horn and silver cup as we chatted. The most prevalent theme in my diary was my feet, imprisoned in heavy boots (see Ingold, 2004: 319, 323). At the close of the first day—when all we’d done was travel a few miles—I complained, ‘My feet are TOTALLY killing me. Plus, I have ‘nettle leg’! My feet hurt so much. I think they must be swollen. I put moleskin on the toe pads of my right middle and ‘ring’ toe and use a toe separator which helps—but agony still persists’. One thing is clear: the physical aspects of walking for days affects the phenomenological response to pilgrimage, whether undertaken as historical ritual or touristic nature hike. The materiality of experience is key to perceptions of journeys as somatic, emotional, and spiritual events. Further, the interkinship of human, road, and environment shows how each element acts dynamically. It is not just the human acting upon the road or within the environment; the road operates as a vibrant agent, as does ecology itself, within the ‘interconnectedness’, the mesh, which is ‘the ecological thought’ (Morton, 2010: 15, 3).

Theoretical approaches such as New Materialism[s], ecomaterialism, material ecocriticism, the material turn, and vibrant materialism concur that ‘things matter […] they possess integrity, power, independence and vibrancy’ (Cohen, 2012: 7; emphasis in original). Objects function as ‘full-fledged actors’ (Iovino and Oppermann, 2014: 4, citing Latour, 1999: 174). A paradigm stemming from the human actor, ecomaterialism ‘invites us to rethink the anthropocentric notion that human owners hold dominion over a somehow separate, nonhuman, corporeal world’ (Provost, 2016: 49–50). By displacing the centrality of humans, we open ‘up more loving affiliations between us and the environment’ (Provost, 2016: 50). In a similar vein, this article looks beyond human actors to the ‘network of animals, plants, and abiotic matter composing’ the environs of which we are part (Provost, 2016: 49).

The objects and non-human actors littering pilgrimage are multiple. The pilgrimage route tells the tales of human and other entities through ‘storied matter’ (Oppermann, 2016a: 30). Transcorporeality (Alaimo, 2014: 187–8) of human with nonhuman actants such as the road and dirt recurs to sustain a practice and poetics of interspecies kinship (Oppermann, 2017c: 3, citing Haraway, 2015: 160). ‘Interspecies’ carries multiple valences. We might expansively view ‘species’ to include non-organic critters, such as the road itself, a vibrant geospatial entity and member of ‘an active, dynamic system’ (Riordan, 2004: 48). Or ‘species’ might refer to the dirt the pilgrim materially encounters in her struggle to cross fields or roads. Pilgrimage writings parallel what occurred on the tracks criss-crossing Europe from shrine to shrine, reveling in the dirt and materiality of the physical pilgrimage. All these ultimately allowed the reader to enact forms of affective piety in a spiritually inflected reading experience.

Actants like dirt and holy dust catalyze our understanding of pilgrimage as materially grounded in the earth. We need to get down and dirty—literally.

While I was teaching a course on 12^th- to 15^th-century Anglo-Norman, Latin, and Middle English pilgrimage works, a student brought me a small, clear plastic bottle as a gift. Inside it was dirt—not just any dirt, rather sacred soil from the Sanctuary of Chimayo in New Mexico. This container now sits on a humble shrine, among various votive offerings, including a replica of the Statue of the Virgin and Child from Walsingham and an Irish cross. Chimayo is most widely known for its pocito [little well] filled with ‘holy dirt’, alleged to have miraculous and curative powers. Many pilgrims travel to El Santuario to obtain some of this dirt (Ortega, 2014: 15), so much so that the local priest has to truck in new dirt to fill in what has been removed: ‘I even have to buy clean dirt!’, he complains (Eckholm, 2008). The priest attributes miraculous healings to the power of God rather than the dirt itself.

How can dirt, generally disdained as a sullying agent, be praised as an actor for healing and purification? We need to take a step back to see waste—and its subset, dirt—within the medieval context (Morrison, 2015). In the earliest usages in English, waste was whatever is no longer of use, something squandered or lacking purpose. Waste has meant barrenness and emptiness—such as uncultivated land—but also excess and surplus—extremes viewed as problematic. The history of waste records a mutable relationship that can alter over time. Clearly one must be wary of making equivalencies between the medieval period, say, and the twenty-first century. An umbrella concept referring to everything from garbage and discards to excrement and dirt, waste is contextual. Once understood in a richly complex way by medievals, images of waste and dirt have become coarse and debased as we have stripped them of their ambivalence. For example, medieval models of virtue are linked to manure, revitalizing as it fertilizes crops. For medieval farmers, excrement was seen as a sign of redemption, contributing to the growth of a harvest that would feed new souls. In Chaucer’s ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, a town is made mention of, whose dung is clearly meant for delivery outside of the walls to fertilize nearby fields. Ecocritics maintain that knowing where our food comes from and where our waste is disposed of prevents alienation and cultivates a sense of agency and even, as Wendell Berry argues, ‘responsibility’ (1990: 149). Just this sort of awareness of waste disposal and food production is integral to the positive weight given to dung in medieval writers.

In this vein, dirt conveyed redemption and healing within a sacred context. While we have ‘broken the bonds of tens of millions of years of coevolution of dirt and terrestrial-vertebrate immunology’ (Lines-Kelly, 2004: 8), dirt was used both as evidence of pilgrims in the form of traces of their paths and by pilgrims for healing purposes. Pilgrims gloss the physical landscape they encounter. Pilgrims gather proof of their travels. In doing so, they leave marks.2 Even my student changed the landscape, leaving with a vial of dirt, thus transforming the surface of the earth upon which he had trod. Conversely, the path functions as a co-author with ‘narrative agenc[y]’ (Oppermann, 2018: 13).

In the emerging discipline of Ecological Digital Humanities, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Stephanie LeMenager have argued for the urgency of exploring, among other things, ‘space[s] of practice’. Pilgrimage is such a space of practice, where multiple actors—human and nonhuman—interact, exemplifying ‘multispecies assemblage’ as well as an ‘ecosystem’ (Cohen and LeMenager, 2016: 341). This multispecies interaction between human and nonhuman actors has generally been elided in the exploration of pilgrimage narrative. As Cohen and LeMenager have pointed out, ‘Created by and for humans, narrative—the natural habitat of most literary scholarship—has a difficult time capturing the nonhuman world, an entangled domain that is always too slow, too swift, too vast, or too small for immediate apprehension’ (2016: 342). Who thinks of the actual stones tripping up physical pilgrims when parsing Middle English lines of, say, Chaucer? Yet, like Cohen’s ‘eco-medieval’ of ‘stone structures used to send wordless stories across millennia’ (Cohen and LeMenager, 2016: 342), pilgrimage paths ‘speak’. We can trace their ‘vibrancy across time’, including the importance of the role of ‘nonhuman forces (weather, sunlight, microclimates, pollution, decay)’ (Cohen and LeMenager, 2016: 343). Pilgrimage practice and pilgrimage narrative conjoin in intra-action (Bennett, 2016: 363, citing Barad, 2007) to create a ‘dappled history’ (Lethbridge and Hartman, 2016: 384) of human communities’ inter- and intra-actions with landscape (Ingold, 2004: 333, referencing Tilley, 1994: 29–30; also Eade, referencing Maddrell et al.). Relics venerated by pilgrims emanate thing-power, just as pilgrimage narratives express vitality.

The life as pilgrimage metaphor spurs human desire to act as physical and spiritual pilgrims in our lives. Certain ‘distinctly geographical acts…encourage spatial thoughts and actions’ (Cresswell, 1997: 334; emphasis in the original). Metaphor usage is not inconsequential. Tim Cresswell criticizes metaphors of displacement (‘the ecological metaphor of the “weed,” the medical metaphor of “disease,” and the bodily metaphor of “secretion”’) as used in geographical writing which have political implications (1997: 330). Rather than those of displacement, let us see how pilgrimage poetry uses placement metaphors. Dirt literally and metaphorically roots the pilgrim into the earth, humbly (‘humus’ is related to ‘humble’) grounding the seeking soul on and in the soil she sometimes ingests. Soil, itself ‘a living multispecies world’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 172), vibrantly changes itself and provokes change in other actors. Indeed, ‘soil guardianship’ can be viewed as ‘a form of ecological curating where the matter of soil is also a metaphor for cultivating the soil of community’ (Fabre Lewin, Gathorne-Hardy, and Adams, 2015: 438).

The vernacular practice of pilgrimage affects land and dirt—both the dirt in which pilgrimage paths have sprung up and the dirt used as healing relic. From the Middle Ages until today, dirt’s vibrant materialism continues to exert its agency on the devout pilgrim. While Serpil Oppermann has looked at instances where the human body becomes toxic through its integration with polluting agents (Oppermann, 2017a: 413, 415), we can understand a substance normally identified as toxic and unhealthful to be a transformative and curative element in the ‘trans-corporeality’ (Alaimo, 2012: 476) of body and dirt (Oppermann, 2016b: 166). Dirt and human become intertwined in moments of intersection. Vibrant dirt entangles with ailing bodies.

What could be more ecological than dirt itself? Why shouldn’t it be healthful? ‘[M]aterial “contexts” are seldom passive’ as Cohen reminds us (2015: 11). ‘Active matter […] radiates agency’ (Cohen, 2015: 22). This is true of dirt: indeed, ‘soil reveals itself as one of the most active organs in the Earth’s “body”’ (Volk, 2015: 103). Rebecca Lines-Kelly has argued that the ‘story of soil is essentially the story of humanity’ (2004: 2). Though urban dwellers may have soil blindness, many cultures have specific words for different soils. Soils are heterogenous living systems (Lines-Kelly, 2004: 12) into which humans can be woven. This ‘traffic of anthropogenic transformations’ (Oppermann, 2017a: 415) indicates an enrichment of both human body and what is seen as an ecological other—dirt, reminiscent of what Timothy Morton has called ‘“dark ecology,” which is “realistic, depressing, intimate, and alive and ironic at the same time”’ (Oppermann, 2016b: 166, citing Morton 2010: 16). The human body, as Oppermann suggests, ‘is storied humus as a knot of biological and imaginative journeys. Its compost stories are inscribed in dirt, in the food we eat, and in poetry’ (2017b, 142; also 146). This hybridity (Iovino, 2014: 101) of human body and dirt shows how each entity catalyzes the other dynamically to provoke healing in an ecosystem of mutuality. Further, as Oppermann suggests, ‘the co-extensive materiality of humans and nonhumans offer multiple possibilities for forging new environmental paths’ (2016b: 163, citing Alaimo and Hekman. 2008: 9). The path in the material I focus on is literary—the poetic line—as well as literal—the pilgrimage path of medieval pilgrimage both practiced and imagined in the Middle Ages.

How does one balance ideals of a traditional practice with modern efforts of environmental preservation? Pilgrimage, enacted on well-worn roads, over fields, and through mastered forests, exists in no pristine bubble. Indeed, ‘the quest for a deeper understanding of the soil’s role in the natural environment and in the life of humanity […] might even be something of a spiritual pilgrimage, impelled by an ancient call, a yearning to return to a life of greater authenticity’ (Lines-Kelly, 2004: 8, referencing Hillel, 1991: 18). In contrast to the climate change refugees of late capitalism (Oppermann, 2017c; Haraway, 2015: 160), pilgrims as voluntary migrants have caused environment degradation from the Middle Ages to today. While ‘bioturbation is the rearrangement of soil morphology and disturbance of sediments by burrowing animals like ants, earthworms, beavers, rodents and plants with root movements that push away soil’, human actors have modified and stressed soil and habitats. Indeed, ‘anthroturbation is actually the worst of all human-induced alterations of the fabric of the Earth’ (Oppermann, 2018: 4–5). Evolving studies examine ‘compelling emotional accounts of environmental degradation in pilgrimage centres’ (Shinde, 2007: 344), from India to Ireland. One issue with pilgrimage degradation focuses on the seasonality of mass migration (Shinde, 2007: 346). Pilgrimage shrines often exist in small towns unaccustomed to a regular flow (literally) of waste in and out. Problems that arise include stress on sewage facilities, solid waste disposal from plastic bottles to convenience foods with packaging, and air pollution from vehicles. Deforestation can also occur, whether from the masses of pilgrims needing paths or roads through forests or from the use of wood for building bridges and accommodation. The introduction of lighting for the safety of pilgrims drives away wildlife, contributing to the eco-devastation of wooded areas. Groundwater is likewise affected, due to deforestation and use by visitors. Traditionally, peak visits would occur at special festival days, such as the day of the Virgin Mary’s Assumption at the shrine of Walsingham. But now pilgrims come at all times of the year, making ‘it difficult for the environment to recover its own capability and render[ing] it vulnerable to degradation’ (Shinde, 2007: 357). One study of Croagh Patrick, in Ireland, suggests this pilgrimage site likewise faces extensive issues in terms of footpath erosion (Prendergast, 2005: 35, 63). While a quarter (24%) of interviewees in a study worried about litter and erosion, few (9%) felt there should be artificial footpath maintenance. Many (45%) felt the difficulties caused by erosion in climbing was part of the experience (Prendergast, 2005: 109). As successful pilgrimages centres see a rise in population, including vendors or merchants of tourist wares or food, the sacred landscape becomes profane.

Evidence of pressures put on the environment by pilgrims also existed in the Middle Ages. The ‘environmental impact’ of the medieval road system development was ‘severely detrimental to the landscape’ (Oram, 2016: 304). Clearances could be extended from established roads into what was called the ‘“waste” […] land that was not intensively exploited for agriculture or bearing a settled population’ (Oram, 2016: 314). While trees provided shade along the Pilgrims’ Way in England —that route from Winchester to Canterbury along the North and South Downs into the Medway Valley, south of the Roman Road [Watling Street] that Chaucer’s pilgrims would have traversed—the ancient route underwent human pruning. Edward I introduced legislation decreeing the edges of highways should be kept clear to reduce the likelihood of crime; brigands were known to prey on defenseless pilgrims far from home (Webb, 2000: 221; Bright, 2010: 20–1; Allen, 2013: 21; Allen and Evans, 2016: 16, 21; Hindle, 2016: 34–5; Cooper, 2016: 62; Prestwich, 2016: 177; Oram, 2016: 308). The Downs route, as a less trafficked path, would have drawn less criminal activity than the main thoroughfare where more victims would likely have been found. Pilgrims, who interact with the land, affect environment: ‘[T]he landscape surface is thus supposed to present itself as a palimpsest for the inscription of cultural form’ (Ingold, 2004: 333), as well as ‘a palimpsest of human and nonhuman movements: a communally intersecting biography’ (Tsing, 2014: 237). Documented erosion suggests that poetic travel goes hand in hand with poetic and physical travail. Pilgrims function as landscape poets, carving their poetic line in the soil that leads from village through wilderness and forest to sacred space.

Medieval roads, determined by function rather than ‘construction and physical parts’ (Allen, 2013: 20), constituted vital arteries from town to town and shrine to shrine. Valerie Allen defines a road as ‘a modification of the environment to enable forward passage to animals and vehicles in a specific geographical direction’ (2013: 21). Roads—ways used by pilgrims—were legally required to be mended. Poetic lines, themselves furrows seeded with fertile words, acknowledge this necessity. In William Langland’s 14th-century pilgrimage allegory Piers Plowman, Truth points out acts of piety, including mending roads:

The concept of a public road suggests as well how everyone has a responsibility or duty to help maintain it, including fixing it (Allen and Evans, 2016: 16). ‘Mend’ and ‘amend’ are variants of the same concept, with ‘mend’ an aphetic version of ‘amend’. Mending a road constitutes a common good (Allen, 2016: 76; also 81, 89). Dame Joan Chamberlain, best known for leaving money to start a school, was the wife of Sir William Chamberlain. She bequeathed money in her will (1501/2), ‘for the “amendyinge and reparinge” of York’s surrounding infrastructure, specifically “wayes or briges, broken or hurte”’ (Allen, 2016: 75). When blocked through man-made or natural impediments, efforts were made to keep roads clear. Numerous legal cases in the Middle Ages and early modern period attest to the necessity for preventing impasses in a road.3

A kind of ‘dirt’ key for roads in the Middle Ages was that of pollution or filth. The ‘interconnectedness between humanity and nonhumanity’ (Bennett, 2004: 367) includes an entanglement which has not always been welcome. Naturalizing the concealment of systems of waste processing, the state enhances its own power both through keeping clear roadways along with maintaining the surveillance of filth (Ingold, 2004: 326). An official entry from 31 August 1445 records:

This financial dealing seems to have been advantageous to each party; the town is guaranteed a clean lane and Bene rents it on condition he keep it clean. Documents specify that the owners of tenements and land must articulate actual boundaries and access points, such as ‘free entry and exit to a comon [original spelling] privy next to John le Scrivenor’s land’.4 Hundreds of legal documents from Chester and Canterbury, to take just two sites as examples, attest to the necessity for the maintenance of clear and well-kept thoroughfares.5 We should not forget William Shakespeare’s father, fined twelvepence in 1552 for neglecting to move a dungheap from in front of his house in Stratford-upon-Avon (Dundes, 1984: 15). While these many recorded instances of people fined for polluting thoroughfares affected not just pilgrims but all wayfarers and travellers, they indicate a fundamental fact: legally, members of a society were all required to keep ways clear for free, safe, and unencumbered passage along common roads. Human waste affected the experience of pilgrimage (Miles-Watson and Miles-Watson, 2011: 325).