Hypotheses

Last autumn I began backpacking, usually on the Superior Hiking Trail, which is an 18-inch wide treadway from Duluth, MN to Canada. Given the frequency and enthusiasm with which my friend and I were hiking the trail, we thought to purchase a trailguide: the Fifth Edition of the Guide to the Superior Hiking Trail. Never had I considered that such books might have a history of their own.

Selection 26 from Constable's Medieval Iberia is a collection of sections from the Pilgrim's Guide to Santiago de Campostela, including the discussions of water safety, indigenous peoples, and the Cathedral itself. For each of these, a modern analogue may be found in the Guide to the SHT and similar texts. For water quality, times have changed, and much of the discussion of water on the SHT is limited to, "All water must be boiled, filtered, or chemically treated," (SHT 39), whereas the Pilgrim's Guide offers an extensive characterization of the quality in all rivers one might pass on the way to Compostela. That is not to say that the level of caution taken with water sources has changed in any way, just the management thereof. One need only look to the several pages of discussion on the topic in Advanced Backpacking, warding off water near farmland. Even the discussion of local water enters the game as the author recalls, "Once on a recent trip in Europe, I contracted a violent intestinal illness despite having treated all of my water," (AB 25). Such tales are not entirely removed from the author of the Pilgrim's Guide recalling the death of his horse at the side of a brook in Lorca.

As for the indigenous peoples, nothing quite so abrasive exists in the modern guidebooks, but cultural collision remains a serious topic in the dispensation of advice to travelers in foreign lands. Advanced Backpacking, for example, takes a couple of pages to remind female backpackers that, "in some cultures, some men seem to think that it's perfectly acceptable to follow, harass, proposition, and even harm female solo travelers," (AB 189). One may find here echoes of the discussion of the "barbarous" peoples in the Pilgrim's Guide, although the spin on how to handle such cultural dissonance has moved from the "disdain and dismiss" of the PG to "blend and respect with caution" in the modern books.

As for the final section of the Constable selection, it goes without saying that no traveler misses an opportunity to eulogize the sights he has seen. Just as the Pilgrim's Guide discusses the history and tales of Compostela, the SHT guidebook is littered with passages describing the origins and stories of each landmark along the trail.

It is perhaps of little surprise that the guidebook, as a genre, as changed little since the middle ages, but it is something of a comfort to know that common sense has not changed much and that the passage of sagely trail advice is a venerable old tradition.