[{"id":"9603","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S6E2, Virtual Pilgrimage: Where Medieval Meets Modern, 4 November 2024, Pereira and Jando-Saul"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/virtual-pilgrimage/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 6"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Lindsay Pereira","Ella Jando-Saul"],"creator_names_search":["Lindsay Pereira","Ella Jando-Saul"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Lindsay Pereira\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ella Jando-Saul\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/2d652a48-92e5-4aab-964f-13c84ab334cc/audio/768dfb20-fca9-4d6c-9e00-295fa04a0338/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s6e2-mixdown.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:51:52\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"49,800,911 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s6e2-mixdown\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/virtual-pilgrimage/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-11-04\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Magical Minstrelsy: Where Medieval Meets Modern Through Mimesis, Season 1 Episode 1: Virtual Pilgrimage uses sounds from Freesound. All sound samples that were used in this episode are licensed under CC0 1.0:\\n\\nFootsteps on dirt: https://freesound.org/people/lzmraul/sounds/389454/\\n\\nBirds: https://freesound.org/people/MATRIXXX_/sounds/519110/\\n\\nWater: https://freesound.org/people/BurghRecords/sounds/415151/\\n\\nCows: https://freesound.org/people/Nontu_Lwazi00/sounds/541920/\\n\\nSheep: https://freesound.org/people/rent55/sounds/709921/\\n\\nHorse on dirt: https://freesound.org/people/Ornery/sounds/233345/\\n\\nHorse with cart: https://freesound.org/people/bruno.auzet/sounds/538438/\\n\\nFootsteps on cobblestone: https://freesound.org/people/SpliceSound/sounds/260120/\\n\\nMedieval city: https://freesound.org/people/OGsoundFX/sounds/423119/\\n\\nChurch bells: https://freesound.org/people/Audeption/sounds/425172/\\n\\nCoins: https://freesound.org/people/husky70/sounds/161315/\\n\\nBlacksmith: https://freesound.org/people/Emmaproductions/sounds/254371/\\n\\nMusic: https://ccmixter.org/files/asteria/2615\\n\\nChurch coins: https://freesound.org/people/scripsi/sounds/335191/\\n\\nGregorian chant: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ecce.lignum.Crucis.ogg\\n\\nCrowd gasping: https://freesound.org/people/craigsmith/sounds/480774/\\n\\nBaby crying: https://freesound.org/people/the_yura/sounds/211527/\\n\\nBreath: https://freesound.org/people/launemax/sounds/274769/\\n\\nHeartbeat: https://freesound.org/people/newlocknew/sounds/612642/\\n\\nWorks Cited and Consulted\\n\\nAhmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge, 2015.\\n\\nArsuaga, Ana Echevarría. “The shrine as mediator: England, castile, and the pilgrimage to Compostela.” England and Iberia in the Middle Ages, 12th–15th Century, 2007, pp. 47–65, https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230603103_4.\\n\\nArvay, Susan M. “Private passions: The contemplation of suffering in medieval affective devotions.” (2008).\\n\\nBailey, Anne E. “Reconsidering the Medieval Experience at the Shrine in High Medieval England.” Journal of Medieval History, vol. 47, no. 2, Mar. 2021, pp. 203–29. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2021.1895874.\\n\\nBeckstead, Zachary. “On the way: Pilgrimage and liminal experiences.” Experience on the Edge: Theorizing Liminality, 2021, pp. 85–105, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83171-4_5.\\n\\nBeebe, Kathryne. Reading Mental Pilgrimage in Context: The Imaginary Pilgrims and Real Travels of Felix Fabri’s “Die Sionpilger.” West Virginia University Press, 2009.\\n\\nBenjamin, Walter. “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, 2018, pp. 217–220, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429498909-39\\n\\nCassidy-Welch, Megan. “Pilgrimage and embodiment: Captives and the cult of saints in late medieval bavaria.” Parergon, vol. 20, no. 2, 2003, pp. 47–70, https://doi.org/10.1353/pgn.2003.0101.\\n\\nColeman, Simon, and John Elsner. “Tradition as play: Pilgrimage to ‘England’s Nazareth.’” History and Anthropology, vol. 15, no. 3, 2004, pp. 273–288, https://doi.org/10.1080/0275720042000257430.\\n\\nColeman, Simon, Ellen Badone, and Sharon R. Roseman. “Pilgrimage to ‘England’s Nazareth’: Landscapes of Myth and Memory at Walsingham.” Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL, 2004, pp. 52–67.\\n\\nColeman, Simon, and Marion Bowman. “Religion in Cathedrals: Pilgrimage, Heritage, Adjacency, and the Politics of Replication in Northern Europe.” Religion, vol. 49, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 1–23. Taylor and Francis+NEJM, https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2018.1515341.\\n\\nColeman, Simon, and John Elsner. “Pilgrimage to Walsingham and the Re-Invention of the Middle Ages.” Pilgrimage Explored, edited by J. (Jennie) Stopford, York Medieval Press, 1999. WorldCat Discovery Service, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=16637.\\n\\nDíaz-Vera, Javier E. “Exploring the relationship between emotions, language and space: Construals of awe in medieval English language and pilgrimage experience.” Studia Neophilologica, vol. 88, no. 2, 2015, pp. 165–189, https://doi.org/10.1080/00393274.2015.1093918.\\n\\nFoster, Elisa A. “As You Came from the Holy Land: Medieval Pilgrimage to Walsingham and Its Crusader Contexts.” Crusading and Ideas of the Holy Land in Medieval Britain, edited by Kathryn Hurlock and Laura J. Whatley, Brepols, Turnhout, Belgium, 2022, pp. 91– 114.\\n\\nGertsman, Elina, and Marian Bleeke. “The Eve Fragment from Autun and the Emotionalism of Pilgrimage.” Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History, Routledge, New York, NY, 2013, pp. 23–41.\\n\\nGrazia Di Stefano, Laura. “How to be a time traveller: Exploring Venice with a fifteenth-century pilgrimage guide.” Making the Medieval Relevant, 2019, pp. 171–190, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110546316-008.\\n\\nGregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth. The Affect Theory Reader. Duke University Press, 2010.\\n\\nHill, Joyce. “Rome in Ripon: St Wilfrid’s Inspiration and Legacy.” History, vol. 105, no. 367, 2020, pp. 603–25. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.13027.\\n\\nHill‐Smith, Connie. “Cyberpilgrimage: The (virtual) reality of online pilgrimage experience.” Religion Compass, vol. 5, no. 6, 2011, pp. 236–246, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8171.2011.00277.x.\\n\\nHundley, Catherine. “Pilgrims in the Parish: A Method and Two Herefordshire Case Studies.” Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture, vol. 8, no. 3, Oct. 2022, pp. 40–87.\\n\\nHurlock, Kathryn. “Virtual Pilgrimage.” Medieval Welsh Pilgrimage, C1100-1500, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY, 2018, pp. 145–174.\\n\\nJenkins, John. “Replication or Rivalry? The ‘Becketization’ of Pilgrimage in English Cathedrals.” Religion, vol. 49, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 24–47. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2018.1515327.\\n\\nKempe, Margery, and Anthony Paul Bale. The Book of Margery Kempe. Oxford University Press, 2015.\\n\\nKuefler, Mathew. The Making and Unmaking of a Saint: Hagiography and Memory in the Cult of Gerald d’Aurillac. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.\\n\\nLangland, William, and Schmidt A. V. C. Piers Plowman: A New Translation of the B-Text. Oxford University Press, 2009.\\n\\nNickell, S. A. The Limits of Embodiment: The Implication of Written and Artistic Portrayals of Mary at the Foot of the Cross for Late Medieval Affective Spirituality, Graduate Theological Union, United States — California, 2011. ProQuest, https://lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Fdissertations-theses%2Flimits-embodiment-implication-written-artistic%2Fdocview%2F875240824%2Fse-2%3Faccountid%3D10246.\\n\\nOusterhout, Robert. “‘Sweetly Refreshed in Imagination’: Remembering Jerusalem in Words and Images.” Gesta, vol. 48, no. 2, Jan. 2009, pp. 153–68. www-journals-uchicago-edu.lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca (Atypon), https://doi.org/10.2307/29764905.\\n\\nPowell, Hilary. “Saints, Pilgrimage and Landscape in Early Medieval Kent, c. 800-1220.” Early Medieval Kent, 800-1220, Boydell Press, 2016, pp. 133–53.\\n\\nSinnett-Smith, Jane. “Ætheldreda in the North: Tracing Northern Networks in the Liber Eliensis and the Vie de Seinte Audree.” Late Medieval Devotion to Saints from the North of England: New Directions, edited by Christiania Whitehead et al., Brepols, Turnhout, Belgium, 2022, pp. 285–303.\\n\\nWynn, Mark. “God, pilgrimage, and acknowledgement of Place.” Religious Studies, vol. 43, no. 2, 2007, pp. 145–163, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034412506008778.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549671116800,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["From medieval itineraries to modern livestreams, Christian pilgrimage is often, if not always experienced through an imaginative transposal from a physical reality to a spiritual truth. In this episode, hosts Lindsay Pereira and Ella Jando-Saul explore the concept of virtual pilgrimage through conversations with two guests: Michael Van Dussen, a professor in the Department of English at McGill University in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, teaches us about the medieval experience of pilgrimage in the British Isles while Simon Coleman, a professor in the\n\nDepartment for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto teaches us about the modern reconstruction of pilgrimage to Walsingham in Norfolk, England.\n\n00:00:03\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental overlapping with feminine voice]\nCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds.\n[Music fades]\n\nMy name is Hannah McGregor, and–\n\n00:00:37\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine McLeod.\nEach month, we’ll bring you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists across Canada.\n\n00:00:50\tHannah McGregor\tIn this episode, producers Ella Jando-Saul and Lindsay Pereira invite us to ask what makes a pilgrimage real.\n00:01:00\tHannah McGregor\tAs digital technologies and global pandemics lead to the rise of virtual pilgrimages, modern spiritual seekers can go on pilgrimage without actually going on pilgrimage.\n00:01:14\tHannah McGregor\tBut is a virtual pilgrimage a mere mediation of the authentic experience? Or are pilgrimages, by nature, an imaginative transposal from a physical reality to a spiritual truth?\nDrawing on the expertise of Dr. Michael Van Dussen, professor of English Literature at McGill University, and Dr. Simon Coleman, professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Toronto, Ella and Lindsay explore the relationship between medieval and modern pilgrimages before inviting us, the listeners, to take part in our own mediated spiritual journey through their sonic reconstruction of a medieval soundscape.\n\n00:01:57\tHannah McGregor\tHere is episode two of season six of the SpokenWeb podcast: Virtual Pilgrimage, Where Medieval Meets Modern.\n00:02:06\tMusic\t[Soft harmonizing music starts playing]\n00:02:16\tElla Jando-Saul\tI’m Ella Jando-Saul, a Master’s student at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, in English Literature.\n00:02:23\tLindsay Pereira\tAnd I’m Lindsay Pereira, your other equally brilliant, equally razzle-dazzle, though significantly shorter host from Concordia’s MA In Literature.\n00:02:34\tLindsay Pereira\tSo, Ella.\n00:02:36\tElla Jando-Saul\tYes, Lindsay?\n00:02:37\tLindsay Pereira\tI have a completely random and unscripted question for you that will miraculously segue into today’s topic.\n00:02:44\tElla Jando-Saul\tWow, you’ve surely piqued my interest. Lindsay, what’s on your mind?\n00:02:47\tLindsay Pereira\tHave you ever gone on a pilgrimage or maybe wanted to go on one?\n00:02:52\tElla Jando-Saul\tUm, okay, no, I’ve never gone on a pilgrimage or even thought about doing so, to be honest. Have you?\n00:02:59\tLindsay Pereira\tElla, I’m so glad you asked. Yes, I have gone on one.\n00:03:04\tLindsay Pereira\tI’ve completed the Camino de Santiago and even have the virtual badge to prove it.\n00:03:09\tElla Jando-Saul\tWait, what? Hold on. When did you go to school? Spain?\n00:03:11\tLindsay Pereira\tNo, no, I didn’t actually travel there. I did the whole walk virtually through my Garmin Forerunner watch.\nI just activated the challenge on the app, and voila.\n\nPilgrimage complete.\n\nLook, it says “Camino de Santiago, start this expedition and hike 784 km by tracking your daily steps.”\n\nCool, right?\n\n00:03:14\tLindsay Pereira\tI did the whole walk virtually through my Garmin Forerunner watch.\n00:03:32\tElla Jando-Saul\tHuh. So, can people go on pilgrimage without going on pilgrimage?\n00:03:37\tLindsay Pereira\tI mean, yeah, it’s a thing.\n00:03:39\tElla Jando-Saul\tIt’s a thing.\n00:03:40\tLindsay Pereira\tYeah, it’s clearly a thing.\n00:03:41\tElla Jando-Saul\tBut is it a good thing?\n00:03:42\tLindsay Pereira\tHow is it a bad thing?\n00:03:44\tElla Jando-Saul\tI’m not saying it’s a bad thing.\n00:03:45\tLindsay Pereira\tElla, my brain hurts. Speak with words, please.\n00:03:48\tElla Jando-Saul\tLook, I’m just saying with my scholarly hat on.\n00:03:51\tLindsay Pereira\tOkay, fine, fine. I’ll Engage Smart Mode 2.\n00:04:02\tElla Jando-Saul\tVirtual Pilgrimage. It’s not a new thing. It’s been around since medieval times, too.\n00:04:06\tLindsay Pereira\tYes, absolutely. Not everyone could afford to travel during that period or was healthy enough even to make such a long, exhausting journey to Jerusalem and back again.\n00:04:16\tElla Jando-Saul\tRight, right, exactly.\n00:04:17\tElla Jando-Saul\tThis is why we have various manuscripts meant as walkthroughs of pilgrimage that were used by nuns who weren’t allowed to physically leave the cloister.\nVirtual pilgrimage was a legitimate workaround for those who couldn’t make the trek.\n\n00:04:30\tLindsay Pereira\tA badge to validate the virtual experience and the indulgences.\n00:04:35\tElla Jando-Saul\tAnd, in a way, all pilgrimage is virtual.\n00:04:38\tLindsay Pereira\tWhat’s that supposed to mean?\n00:04:39\tElla Jando-Saul\tWell, ultimately, we are all metaphorically on a pilgrimage toward Judgment Day. And when we travel to Jerusalem, we’re symbolically walking in Christ’s footsteps.\n00:04:48\tElla Jando-Saul\tWhen we travel to Canterbury, Santiago, Walsingham, Hereford, or any number of other pilgrimages, we are metaphorically walking in the footsteps of a saint and, ultimately, of Christ and imaginatively taking ourselves to Jerusalem and Judgment Day.\n00:05:02\tLindsay Pereira\tSo then, why are you poo-pooing my flashy, virtual, totally legit pilgrimage badge?\n00:05:08\tElla Jando-Saul\tElla, I’m not.\nI’m just wondering about things.\n\n00:05:11\tLindsay Pereira\tThings like pilgrimage hierarchy.\nLike is a virtual pilgrimage less valuable or respected than an in-person one?\n\n00:05:20\tElla Jando-Saul\tNo. Well, yeah.\nI mean, it’s an interesting point to consider. Think about Benjamin, right? What’s his first name?\n\nWalter…Walter…\n\n00:05:32\tLindsay Pereira\tWalter.\n00:05:34\tElla Jando-Saul\tWalter Benjamin.\nAnd his concept of the “aura” that an artistic object has.\n\nLike the Mona Lisa, for example. It’s more meaningful to actually have the real Mona Lisa. Even if you had a high-resolution print or a near-indistinguishable replica, it wouldn’t give you the same feature feeling as being in the presence of the painting created by Da Vinci.\n\nAnd in the case of pilgrimage, it’s more concrete. Like, will this experience actually heal me? Will it actually bring me closer to God? And, will this pilgrimage actually have my prayers answered?\n\n00:06:09\tLindsay Pereira\tOkay, okay.\nWell, there’s another reason I’m interested in talking about pilgrimage with you today. The Garmin Watch was merely a brilliant lead-in for my big reveal.\n\n00:06:22\tElla Jando-Saul\tLindsay, what’s going on?\n00:06:23\tLindsay Pereira\tElla, you may previously be aware of my Portuguese background from such things as our years long friendship and the fact that I don’t try to hide it.\nAnd my, you know, clearly, very obviously Portuguese last name.\n\n00:06:39\tElla Jando-Saul\tYes.\n00:06:41\tLindsay Pereira\tYou may also be definitely previously aware from such things as Professor Yeager’s grad class, colourfully entitled “Virgins, Martyrs, Trans Folk, the Early English Saint’s Life,” that my interest in pilgrimage stems from my father’s 50-year plus career as leader of a religious Marian pilgrimage known as the “Romaria,” which is specific to the Azorean island of San Miguel and in existence since 1522.\n00:07:09\tElla Jando-Saul\tWell, this is both absolutely shocking and incredibly exciting.\nTell me more.\n\n00:07:14\tLindsay Pereira\tSo, my father, Eduardo Pereira, was a master who led pilgrims on an eight-day journey during Lent.\n00:07:25\tLindsay Pereira\tThey would all walk from before dawn until dusk, no matter the weather, in a clockwise direction around the island, stopping at churches and chapels, all the while praying the rosary and singing religious songs. At night, benevolent hosts who considered such guests a blessing from the Virgin Mary would feed and shelter them.\nOr if no homes were able to take them in, they’d sleep on the floor of a local church.\n\n00:07:52\tElla Jando-Saul\tWow, eight days. That’s a lot of walking.\n00:07:54\tLindsay Pereira\tYeah. And praying. They walk, they pray, they pray, they walk.\n00:08:01\tLindsay Pereira\tI can’t help but think about this sort of invisible yet increasingly potent buildup of what Sarah Ahmed, everyone’s favourite affect theorist, would call affective value. I’m picturing all these pilgrims doing this pilgrimage on a yearly basis, going through the same motions, and every year it becomes more important, more powerful, more valuable.\n00:08:29\tElla Jando-Saul\tIt increases in effective value. And that’s why it feels so intense for pilgrims.\n00:08:32\tLindsay Pereira\tExactly.\n00:08:33\tElla Jando-Saul\tBut at the same time, I feel like there’s this thing where something gets super popular and then suddenly it’s too popular and it’s not cool to like anymore. Or it gets commodified.\nLike everyone is going on pilgrimage these days, or I guess those days in the 14th century, and suddenly you aren’t sure if people are going because they really want to connect with God or just because they want to look good.\n\n00:08:53\tElla Jando-Saul\tAnd someone might, for instance, take issue with feeling accomplished for having completed the Camino de Santiago via their Garmin forerunner.\n00:09:00\tLindsay Pereira\tHey, I thought we were besties.\n00:09:00\tElla Jando-Saul\tOkay, look, now I’m really excited to learn more about pilgrimages—medieval pilgrimages, that is.\n00:09:10\tLindsay Pereira\tYes, me too.\nI have so many questions, but we need more background information, more learned input, and more context.\n\nNow it’s time for “What’s up, Prof?” The part of the podcast where we interview experts in the field to learn about important medieval-ly things so we can become not just smart scholars but also smarmy Scholars.\n\n00:09:40\tElla Jando-Saul\tLindsay, that’s not a good thing.\n00:09:41\tLindsay Pereira\tFor the first episode, we are treating you to two experts.\n00:09:45\tElla Jando-Saul\tWe interview Drs—Michael Van Dussen of McGill University and Simon Coleman of the University of Toronto.\nDr. Van Dussen speaks to us about the material culture of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages. He introduces us to objects such as pilgrimage badges and itineraries and discusses the cultural conception of travel.\n\n00:10:03\tLindsay Pereira\tDr. Coleman tells us about the modern revival of an important medieval pilgrimage site in Walsingham, England. Walsingham is a remote village in Norfolk that has become a popular pilgrimage destination over the last century.\nThe site contains a variety of historical and modern shrines to Our Lady of Walsingham, an apparition of Mary in that area. Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and non-religious pilgrims gather in the village throughout the spring and summer to venerate the saint and reconnect with England’s medieval past.\n\n00:10:40\tMichael Van Dussen\tWell, hello, I’m Michael Van Dussen. I’m a professor in the English literature department at McGill University in Montreal and I work a lot on medieval manuscripts, medieval travel, and I’m happy to talk with you today.\n00:11:00\tSimon Coleman\tWell, hello, I’m Simon Coleman.\nI’m a professor of the Anthropology of Religion based in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto.\n\nAnd my latest book on pilgrimage is called Powers of Pilgrimage Religion in a World of Movement that was published about a year ago. And it really tries to take us through different ways in which anthropologists and others have tried to analyze the significance of pilgrimage in the contemporary world.\n\n00:11:32\tElla Jando-Saul\tFrom your email, I understood that you’ve worked with the material culture of medieval pilgrimage.\n00:11:40\tMichael Van Dussen\tYeah, I am not intentionally going for pilgrimage, though.\nYeah. So I mean, people are traveling for a number of different reasons, but the idea of “curiosity-based” travel, where you’re just going around to see the sights and that’s an end in itself.\n\nThat’s the reason for doing it. That’s not really a culturally held value in the later Middle Ages. I mean it’s coming to be one sort of. But people are apologetic about it or people are maybe doing something out of curiosity, but they are also doing something for a more traditionally legitimate reason as well.\n\nSo that could be a pilgrimage. So, it’s something that’s infused with theological, devotional, and especially significant aspects. Or it could be trade, but trade is always iffy sometimes. But it’s a legitimate reason to travel or diplomacy. So, political travel is traveling for political reasons. But one of the things that are interesting is that what I’m going to call pilgrimage sort of loosely finds its way into all of this kind of travel.\n\n00:12:59\tSimon Coleman\tYou know, some of the best historians of Walsingham and people who’ve written really interesting work on Walsingham are also themselves associated with the church in some way.\nThose are people who are very, very keen on getting the historical facts right. And, you know, Walsingham is more than just a place where there are numerous shrines. Walsingham also has numerous archives. I hope to look at the archives again in a few months.\n\n00:13:34\tSimon Coleman\tAnd so there are all sorts of ways in which people are working to try and make the if you like, the religious or the theological and the historical come together.\n00:13:50\tSimon Coleman\tThere are obviously occasions when people see them as clashing. And I guess I’ll give you one example: If we go back to the Anakin shrine, I think I mentioned to you earlier that, you know, it’s not where the original site was when it was first constructed.\nA well and some artifacts were discovered in the area when the Anglican shrine was constructed. And, you know, Hope Patton at one point was thinking, okay, well, actually, look, God has actually brought us to the original place, you know, by providence, and gradually decided, you know, it’s not clear how long he kept that view.\n\n00:14:48\tSimon Coleman\tGradually, that view tends to fade.\n00:14:50\tSimon Coleman\tIn the 1960s, an archaeological dig is made, it seems, to establish the original site further away. And yet when I first went to Walsingham in the 1990s and I said to people, hi, I’m an anthropologist.\nI’m here to look at the shrines, people said to me, oh, I hope you’re going to actually discover a real place where the original shrine was.\n\nSo even the archaeology of the 1960s had not quite settled this sense of where people felt that the shrine should be for religious and theological reasons. And so there’s always this kind of. There may be slight tension. Not always, but it’s often this slight tension.\n\n00:15:38\tSimon Coleman\tAnd for many people, you know, where history and theology or when history and faith clash, of course, for many people, faith wins. What matters is what Walsingham can do for one’s faith and how it might bring one closer to a church. And I’ve had some clergy and pilgrims say that they don’t want to know the details of the history because that’s precise. That’s not important. And that’s a distraction from Walsingham’s real message.\n00:16:18\tSimon Coleman\tAnd in that sense, I find it fascinating and curious that if you go to the original site of the Holy House, for instance, there’s the kind of. That’s now a blank space, and there’s a big kind of arch, which is the original east window of the pirate.\nThat’s there, but there isn’t much else. Of course, that means that people can insert their own imaginations into the site. They can reclose a relatively blank space with their ideas of what the medieval shrine should be for them as pilgrims.\n\n00:17:02\tMichael Van Dussen\tI accidentally found an itinerary in an ugly manuscript in Prague Castle.\n00:17:10\tMichael Van Dussen\tYou know, forgive me, a proud castle for saying the manuscript’s ugly, but it’s got water damage all over it, and it’s grimy. And the last part of this manuscript is soiled. It’s gross and different from the rest of the manuscript it’s bound with. It was clearly carried on its own as a little notebook on the trip that it describes. And there’s this guy; he seems to be a knight. He’s called a Miles, a knight in Latin. But we don’t know anything about it, or what he’s travelling for.\n00:17:43\tMichael Van Dussen\tWhat we do know is that he moves from Prague and makes his way across the continent in the direction of England. He dips down to Paris, goes back up to Calais, and crosses the English Channel.\nAnd then he starts being interested in what he’s describing England. He describes stuff in other places, too, but he’s really kind of. His curiosity, you can just come back to that word, is piqued.\n\n00:18:08\tMichael Van Dussen\tAnd he…It’s unclear. Sometimes people are writing their itineraries themselves.\nSometimes, if they’re a little more wealthy, they might have a secretary traveling with them who writes things for them.\n\nWe don’t know who wrote this, but I have found evidence of people going through England and other places with multiple secretaries writing their itineraries.\n\nSo that’s another layer.\n\n00:18:36\tMichael Van Dussen\tI don’t know in this particular case, but he starts to describe the distances between places. You know, this is a very…almost literally grounded itinerary. It’s saying, from Dover or Dover to Rochester or Canterbury to London.\nThis many miles use different units of measurement. And you get a sense that his recording stops along the way, about as far as he could go in a day’s ride on a horse, probably with some other people.\n\n00:19:12\tMichael Van Dussen\tHe goes to Canterbury. He describes the shrine of Thomas Becket as one that no longer survives. One of the tricky things about England is that most of these shrines, these pilgrimage destinations, were destroyed during the Reformation.\nIt’s interesting when we find material evidence of what a shrine looked like because we don’t have that anymore in most cases. So, he describes this shrine of Thomas Becket. It’s golden and beautiful. He doesn’t give a lot of information. He goes to London, to Westminster Abbey, where the queen is crowned and everything.\n\n00:19:55\tMichael Van Dussen\tThen he starts describing all sorts of tombs, which do, for the most part, survive.\nThese still are…You could go to Westminster today and still see what he’s describing. And he describes them. Some of them are saints, some of them are just, you know, kings and queens who died. He’s impressed by these tombs. They’re imposing tombs. And he does the same in St.Paul’s Cathedral. He describes tombs.\n\n00:20:22\tMichael Van Dussen\tHe describes the dimensions of the place in swords, which is weird because he describes the dimensions in swords. It’s this many swords wide, it’s this many swords long, and it’s this many swords high from the ground into the top of the.\nThat’s hilarious—the steep. Like, wait a minute, how’s he doing this? Appropriate. It’s nuts. Is he going around with a sword? But then, how’s he getting up to the very top of this? But then I found. He’s not. He’s not.\n\n00:20:54\tMichael Van Dussen\tI found it by accident. The exact same description, maybe a couple of words different, but the exact same measurements, the exact same everything, is found in another manuscript in the British Library.\nIt tells you where those measurements are written. They’re written down. They’re written on posted texts. Say, this is St.Paul’s Cathedral. This is how big it is, this is how many swords wide it is, or whatever width it is, it’s how tall it is. These are the different tombs. This is who’s buried there.\n\n00:21:26\tMichael Van Dussen\tThis is this cross, this pilgrimage destination at the north door, this CR Cross associated with Joseph of Arimathea and the Christianization of England. There are all these guides in textual form that he’s just transcribing.\nAs I said, I first studied waiting in the 1990s, and sure, we had, you know, we could have email and so on, but it feels like it’s a kind of world apart.\n\n00:21:59\tMichael Van Dussen\tYou Know, going back in the.In the 2000s and twenties. Of course, that has to do with technology, but it also has to do with the post. Post covert experience and the sense I got, you know, having and having done. I’ve been in Walsingham a lot over the last year, especially just posting in the post-COVID period, if you can call it post-COVID. We’re not quite post Covid now, but you know, what I mean was the ways in which actually that sent that.\n00:22:24\tMichael Van Dussen\tDuring that period, people could not come to the shrines, people physically could not come to the shrines, or very few people could.\n00:22:33\tMichael Van Dussen\tAnd you had this kind of. You had to have these groups separate. They were separated from each other.\nSo, you had to separate people physically from each other as they went through. So, how could the shrines respond to that?\n\nWell, as I guess must have been true for many other parts of the Christian and wider religious world, they discovered or were kind of forced into thinking about the role of technology. So rather than simply saying the shrines are closed and nobody can come, they realized that they could actually use cameras in the shrines, Facebook, and other ways of linking with pilgrims.\n\nAnd now, you started to get daily masses broadcast from the shrines—sorry, both shrines. Of course, this linked the shrines with people who would normally have been at Walsingham but couldn’t make it. But it also started to link them with even wider constituencies.\n\n00:23:43\tSimon Coleman\tSo you’ve got a shrine mass, and you suddenly realize that people who are attending that mass virtually, who are looking through the cameras at the priest at the altar, and so on, are people who are spread around the world.\n00:23:58\tSimon Coleman\tAnd so in a curious sense, you’ve, I mean, as one person put it, one, one. One priest put it, he said we broadened our constituency.\nWe actually increased our connections through COVID-19 in a curious way. And there’s one point when there’s a big, you know, celebration that takes place in the Anakin shrine. And it’s one on the national level. It’s one of the national days, and it crashes. I think this.\n\nI forget whether it’s the Anakin or the Roman Catholics, but, you know, the shrine crashes, the link crashes because there are so many people actually trying to get on or that’s certainly one possible explanation. But there’s a wider aesthetic sense here, which is that it’s not just that the linkages are made with a wider constituency.\n\n00:24:46\tSimon Coleman\tAnd okay, at the kind of Fsites, you can see how people attending mass also chat with each other.\n00:24:55\tSimon Coleman\tSo there’s another. There’s communication going on there that wouldn’t have taken place otherwise.\nBut there’s a wider sense in which the use of cameras actually means that images from the shrines are used in such a way that it allows the viewer to get much closer to, say, statues or other parts of the shrine’s material culture.\n\nAnd so effectively you might actually have an image of a statue of, say that of Our lady of Walsingham from the Slipper Chapel. And there’s an image that’ll be on the video, and nothing happens for half an hour.\n\n00:25:36\tSimon Coleman\tBut of course, it. You have a cl. Effectively, you can meditate on that statue in a way you wouldn’t have been able to do if you had been there. And so I’m like, there’s a sense in which there’s a kind of diffusion of links, but also a kind of magnification and bringing one closer to these images, even if one can’t physically touch them.\nAnd then, of course, as has happened in other pilgrimage sites, you know, people do them in their local areas so that you recreate the sense of going on pilgrimage. But you can’t do it physically in Norfolk, but you can do it in your local area, possibly with walking with other people, if you’re allowed to.\n\n00:26:28\tSimon Coleman\tAgain, there are all sorts of ways in which people can retain this sense or magnify this sense.\n00:26:34\tElla Jando-Saul\tBeing in touch with Walsingham and that sort of doing a local pilgrimage because you can’t actually do the bigger one, is something that we’ve been researching a lot for this project because that’s a lot of what medieval pilgrimage in England seems to be doing is like, well, if you can’t actually make it to Jerusalem, you can make it to this cathedral in England and that’ll be a stand in for Jerusalem.\n00:27:07\tSimon Coleman\tThis is absolutely true.\n00:27:08\tSimon Coleman\tAnd of course what we need to bear in mind is that Walsingham itself, and when I think about Walsingham, I talk about Walsingham as the place, but I also talk about Walsingham as the experience.\n00:27:21\tSimon Coleman\tBoth Catholic and Anglican shrines are linked up with parishes and dioceses that will have their own local altars where you might Celebrate Our Lady of Walsingham.\n00:27:38\tSimon Coleman\tYou might get together once you know you’re part of a guild or something else orientated towards Our Lady of Walsingham.\nAnd so it’s not. You don’t just think about Walsingham when you’re going on pilgrimage.\n\nYou might actually come together, have a Mass, and celebrate Our Lady. You’ll gather under the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham in your local parish church. And so, the statue itself—the statue of Our Lady might be taken from either shrine and might be taken around the country. And so you might be visited by Our Lady of Walsingham.\n\nShe might come to see you in your local church. Very famously, for instance, the Roman Catholic statue of Our Lady was taken to Wembley Stadium, a big sports stadium in London, in the 1980s, when the Pope, Pope John II, John Paul II, came to England. He celebrated Mass in Wembley Stadium, and on the altar was our statue of Our Lady of Walsingham. So she is mobile.\n\n00:29:01\tSimon Coleman\tAnd, you know, Pope John Paul II effectively contacts her and blesses her, and then she returns to Walsingham. So Walsingham, as a wider experience, is itself mobile.\n00:29:18\tSimon Coleman\tAnd then this gets augmented, as we say, during COVID as people recreate not just to celebrate Mass. You can’t get together to celebrate Mass in your local church, but you can still go on a walk and coordinate with others online.\n00:29:32\tSimon Coleman\tI think this has had some degree of effect after the lockdown experience, where people have realized that you can expand the ways in which you celebrate your connection to Wolsingham.\n00:29:51\tMichael Van Dussen\tI mean, a lot of these are not like the texts, say, the Stations of Jerusalem or Stations of Rome, which are encouraging.\n00:30:20\tMichael Van Dussen\tThey’re not just saying, and it takes one day to get from here to here, or this is how many meters wide this is or something. These kinds of itineraries. Yeah, swords wide, you know, statues or something. This isn’t what they’re recording. They’re. They’re usually much more meditative. Yeah, they are. They have a reference point to specific locations and what’s there, but they might.\n00:31:03\tMichael Van Dussen\tI don’t know if you know about the Stations of the Cross, but you’ll find in every Catholic church today and during Lent, especially leading up to Easter, the Stations of the Will, there will be Stations of the Cross. So you can come.\nIt can be separate from a Mass or part of a Mass, and sometimes physically walk around the church. It’s inside the church but around the walls. And there’ll be 14. You know, all the stations that represent the stages of the Passion of Christ. And they are located in, you know, Jerusalem. But it’s a meditative experience. And sometimes, it’s sort of a pilgrimage within the church.\n\nThis still happens every year today, but I’m mentioning that because these stations of Jerusalem or stations of Rome proceed in similar ways—not identical, but similar. So they’re very meditative and prayerful.\n\n00:31:58\tMichael Van Dussen\tUsually, there are prayers interposed between descriptions of a location so that the emphasis is.\nIt’s hard to lose sight of the idea that the emphasis is spiritual and not just sort of like, “Oh, and then there’s this great place.”\n\nYou’ve got to go to this one bar. It’s not right near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Sorry, that sounds blasphemous. One of the things I have heard people talk about is that you know, of course, physically going. Going to the place does more than just put you in. Touch with a place that may differ greatly from your local experience in your everyday experience.\n\n00:33:02\tSimon Coleman\tOf course, you can have your Walsingham, your statue of Our Lady Walsingham, in your local parish, but that’s different than making an effort to travel, let’s say, 200 miles in a coach with other parish members.\n00:33:03\tSimon Coleman\tYou’ve paid. You’ve paid some money, which may be difficult for some people.\nYou are seeing fellow parishioners in a new way. And a lot of people talk about this idea of when you kind of get towards Walsingham, you feel as though there’s this. Suddenly, this bubble appears. It’s a bubble that surrounds the village. And you go through that bubble, and you’re in a Norfolk.\n\nBut you. Maybe you. You may come from industrial Manchester, okay? And that’s where you are most of the year. And maybe you haven’t. You only travel a little. And then suddenly you find yourself, Reg. You know, you. Once a year, you find yourself in this Norfolk rural village. And you’re seeing people who you may know very well. You’re seeing them in a new way. You’re not just that, but you come, and the clergy at the shrine recognize you. And some clergy are brilliant at this. They may see you once a year, but they say, oh, hello, Simon, how lovely to see you again. You know, hello, Lindsay, how. Hello, Ella. It was lovely to see you again. You know, I remember last year. Oh, have you come with your friend?\n\n00:34:21\tSimon Coleman\tSo, all of that, that complex process of hosting is occurring. And then, of course, there’s the fact that you are separating yourself from a lot of the things that you might be having to do at home.\nPeople talk about it, and it allows you to have a particular kind of focus when you actually get there.\n\n00:34:59\tSimon Coleman\tSo it’s a combination of the place itself and the experience of having gotten away and having a time and space in which you can focus in unusual ways on the pilgrimage experience, which I think is very significant.\n00:35:00\tSimon Coleman\tAnd I talked. I have written about this.\nWe need. When we think about that experience, it’s not just a question of looking at what happens actually in shrines or liturgically.\n\nIt’s also looking at what happens on one side of the official worship experiences: that you talk to people and engage in spaces adjacent to shrines but somehow significant.\n\nThey may not be obviously religious, but I call them lateral spaces rather than liminal spaces and times, kind of penumbral spaces, where you’re temporarily and spatially in the environment of a site, but you’re not necessarily celebrating a Mass at any given moment, but you are somehow orientated towards a pilgrimage experience.\n\nIt’s those fuzzier spaces that are also very important. You don’t get them when, effectively, you’ve looked at the shrine through your screen, switched the laptop off, and that’s it. And all of a sudden, you’re back into your everyday.\n\n00:36:23\tSimon Coleman\tAnd those Anglo Catholic sensibilities that we’ve talked about were sometimes derisively talked about as being kind of British Museum religion. And why are you going back to an ossified faith?\n00:36:35\tSimon Coleman\tBut of course, what we’re trying to understand here is how it’s not an ossified faith.\n00:36:49\tSimon Coleman\tIt’s a faith where the past and the present are so closely sandwiched and allied together for theological and other reasons that we’ve got to try and think back into a sensibility where the past becomes living in a new.\nIn a new kind of way.\n\n00:37:07\tElla Jando-Saul\tWow, well said.\n00:37:08\tElla Jando-Saul\tCan we do that? Can we create a sensibility where the past becomes living?\n00:37:12\tLindsay Pereira\tWe sure can.\n00:37:12\tLindsay Pereira\tWith the magic of our next segment, Medieval mixtape soundscape shapes from centuries past.\n00:37:20\tAudio Clip\t[Background noise of sheep and chatter]\n[Background chatter in Middle English]\n\nIt that will not…\n\nA fool I…\n\nWish is overcome…\n\nBut first in and…\n\nEke to bring and weave as in sweet farm Thou mayest have not of…\n\nAnother thing a brother of who hath no way he eats no kukiwal but e say natural…\n\nThe morning in the morning in the morning, in the morning…\n\n00:49:39\tLindsay Pereira\tThank you, gentle listeners, humble scholars and fellow medieval addicts.\n00:49:53\tElla Jando-Saul\tThanks to James Healy and the rest of Concordia’s SpokenWeb Team for letting us use their facilities and to the Center for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia for lending us fantastic recording equipment.\n00:50:02\tLindsay Pereira\tAnd thank you, of course, to our lovely experts, Professors Michael Van Dusen and Simon Coleman.\n00:50:02\tLindsay Pereira\tDon’t forget to check out Professor Coleman’s book– Farathya Sunder.\n00:50:08\tMusic\t[Harmonized singing and music starts playing]\n00:50:56\tHannah McGregor\tYou’ve been listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast. The Spoken Web Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken Web Team to distribute audio collected from and created using Canadian Literary Archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n00:51:00\tHannah McGregor\tElla Jando-Saul and Lindsey Pereira produced this month’s episode.\n00:51:01\tHannah McGregor\tSpecial thanks to Dr.Michael Van Dussen and Dr.Simon Coleman for lending their time and expertise.\n00:51:18\tHannah McGregor\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast Team supervises producer Maia Harris, sound designer TJ Macpherson, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Katherine McLeod and, me, Hannah McGregor.\n00:51:29\tHannah McGregor\tTo learn more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you may listen.\n00:51:36\tHannah McGregor\tIf you love us, let us know, rate us, leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media. Plus, check social media for info about our listening parties and more.\n00:00:50\tHannah McGregor\tThanks for listening.\n\n"],"score":6.2313833},{"id":"9669","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 4.6, What’s that noise? Listening Queerly to the Ultimatum Festival Archives, 19 June 2023, Jando-Saul"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/whats-that-noise-listening-queerly-to-the-ultimatum-festival-archives/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Ella Jando-Saul"],"creator_names_search":["Ella Jando-Saul"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ella Jando-Saul\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/c4891c8a-e6b8-4a15-b0b4-7ba2b7d4e22a/audio/4d8d4112-c9a7-490e-a3e5-4b973c419512/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sc4-6.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:20:50\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"20,008,168 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sc4-6\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/whats-that-noise-listening-queerly-to-the-ultimatum-festival-archives/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-06-19\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"bissett, bill, Christopher Dewdney, and Tom Konyves. U-2-2. 2 May 1985. Folder 2, Deliverables, Audio-Deliverables, The Alan Lord Collection. SpokenWeb Collections, Concordia University, Montreal.\\n\\nbissett, bill, Christopher Dewdney, and Tom Konyves. U-BNW-T5. 2 May 1985. Folder 2, Deliverables, Audio-Deliverables, The Alan Lord Collection. SpokenWeb Collections, Concordia University, Montreal.\\n\\nThose interested can find more information about these recordings in the following documents:\\n\\nbissett, bill. Participant acceptance form. AL-Folder2-img003-04, Folder 1, Alan Lord Archive, The Alan Lord Collection. SpokenWeb Collections, Concordia University, Montreal.\\n\\nbissett, bill. Letter to Alan Lord. AL-Folder2-img195, Folder 1, Alan Lord Archive, The Alan Lord Collection. SpokenWeb Collections, Concordia University, Montreal.\\n\\nKonyves, Tom. Sketch of stage setup. AL-Folder2-img186-187, Folder 1, Alan Lord Archive, The Alan Lord Collection. SpokenWeb Collections, Concordia University, Montreal.\\n\\nLescaut, Roxa. “Le Premier Festival de Poésie urbaine de Montréal.” interModule 2. AL-U85-img029-32 and 035-38, Folder 1, Alan Lord Archive, The Alan Lord Collection. SpokenWeb Collections, Concordia University, Montreal.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549793800192,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Have you ever heard a sound on a recording and weren’t sure if it was intentional? That’s what happened to the Listening Queerly research team when they were listening to a recording of the Ultimatum Festival (Montreal, 1985). This team works under the direction of Dr. Mathieu Aubin as part of a SSHRC-funded Insight Development Grant. They’ve been working with a series of recordings of the Ultimatum Festival, which are part of the Alan Lord audio collection, a collection currently being digitized and catalogued by SpokenWeb (Concordia). The Listening Queerly research team – Mathieu Aubin, Ella Jando-Saul, Misha Solomon, Sophia Magliocca, and Rowan Nancarrow – first attempted to confirm who they are listening to in their selected audio file for this ShortCuts by cross-referencing with other recordings of Christopher Dewdney, Tom Konyves, and bill bissett, but then, as the team re-listened to this recording, they focused more and more on the rhythmic thumping sound throughout this clip. What is the cause of this sound and its effect on us as listeners?\n\nListen to this episode of ShortCuts to hear how, even if a sound is an unintentional sound caused by the recording equipment, it still affects our interpretation of the recording.\n\nThis special episode of ShortCuts is produced by Ella Jando-Saul, with contributions from Mathieu Aubin, Misha Solomon, Sophia Magliocca, Rowan Nancarrow, and James Healey. \n\n\n(00:00)\tShortCuts Theme Music \t[Soft piano music interspersed with electronic sound begins]\n  (00:07)\tKatherine McLeod \tWelcome to Shortcuts.\nHave you ever heard a sound on a recording and weren’t sure if the sound was intentional? That’s what happened to the Listening Queerly research team when they were listening to a recording of the Ultimatum Festival in the Alan Lord Audio Collection. First of all, Listening Queerly is a team of student researchers based at Concordia University: Ella Jando-Saul, Misha Solomon, Sophia Magliocca, and Rowan Nancarrow. This team works under the direction of Dr. Mathieu Aubin as part of a SSHRC funded Insight Development grant. \nThey’ve been working with a series of recordings in the Alan Lord Audio Collection, a collection that’s part of SpokenWeb’s audio collections. In 1985, Alan Lord helped to organize the Ultimatum Festival in Montreal. And recordings from that festival are what the Listening Queerly team were listening to when they heard a sound. A sound that sounded almost like a heartbeat, or was it a technical glitch in the recording? Could they be sure? What were they hearing? What’s that noise? \nWhatever it was, the reality was that the sound, the noise, had an impact. They couldn’t stop thinking about it, and they talked about it together. What results from those conversations is this episode of ShortCuts. Here is a very special episode of ShortCuts produced by Ella Jando-Saul, taking you on a deep dive into the sound of one memorable recording. [ShortCuts music swells and then ends]\n(02:02)\tElla Jando-Saul \t[Sound effect of a heart beating begins] \nIn 1985, Alan Lord with help from a team of close friends organized Ultimatum, a literary festival that took place from May 1st to 5th at Les Foufounes Électriques, a punk bar that exists to this day in downtown Montreal. Ultimatum was advertised as an event presenting both a new generation of urban poets who utilize video, computers, electro pop music and performance art as an integral part of their mode of expression, and also traditional poets whose work reflects the urgency and electricity of living in a modern urban environment. \nLord invited both Anglophone and Francophone poets from Montreal, as well as poets from Vancouver, Toronto, Quebec City, and New York. The event was recorded on tapes, which have since been digitized at Concordia University. The tape we are listening to today is from the 2nd of May. \n[Heartbeat sound effect speeds up and then ends]\n(03:05)\tMathieu Aubin\tHi, my name is Mathieu Aubin and I’m the primary investigator for the Listening Queerly Cross-Generational Divides Project, and I’m also a research affiliate in the English department at Concordia University.\n(03:17)\tElla Jando-Saul\tMy name is Ella Jando-Saul and I am the project manager for the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides project. I am also finishing my first year in the masters program at Concordia University in English Literature.\n(03:31)\tSophia Magliocca\tHi, my name is Sophia Magliocca. I’m a research assistant on the SpokenWeb affiliate project called Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides. I’m also finishing my second year in the masters program here at Concordia University in English Literature.\n(03:45)\tMisha Solomon\tHi, my name is Misha Solomon. I’m a queer listener on the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides project. I’m also finishing my first year as a master student in the English literature program here at Concordia, with a creative poetry thesis.\n(03:59)\tElla Jando-Saul \tAs part of our research, we listened to the Ultimatum recordings and encountered a tape that included a mysterious heartbeat sound on some of the tracks. The poet speaking on those tracks was unannounced, so we were not sure who it might be. At the time, our team included Rowan Nancarrow, who has since left, but who did much of the listening and contributed to our initial discussions about these tapes.\n(04:29)\tArchival Audio from Alan Lord Archive- [Unknown Speaker] 1\t[Sound effect of a heartbeat begins to play] With real trees around us, why do we want painted trees? What does art give us that life does not?\n[Sound effect of heartbeat ends]\n(04:43)\tElla Jando-Saul \t…many months ago, Misha, you’re actually part of the team already, even though it’s the 8th of December, 2022. And we’re having a conversation as we do on a Monday morning about this tape. Yeah, the weird heartbeat noise is really interesting to me because I can’t tell if it’s intentional or not, and it’s doing really interesting things with the poet’s voice.\nIt’s sort of, I feel like sometimes rhythmically it’s aligning with the rhythm of the poem, and sometimes it’s not, and I find that super interesting, but then we get this like four minutes of just heartbeat, and I find it hard to imagine that that was intentionally just sort of recorded, and there’s the fact that the sound is different. So I’m thinking maybe there’s something that happened to the tape itself, that when we play the tape to digitize it is making this noise.\n(05:41)\tSophia Magliocca \tWhen I found it, when I came across it, I was almost not going to present it at all. The only reason why I decided to present it was because I thought it was a broken tape, and I thought it would be interesting to talk about what a broken tape might look like in this collection. \nSo my initial impression of it was either it got damaged, you know, the tape itself was damaged and they recorded on something that was already damaged and that’s what happened. Or it was like you said, kind of some way affected when they were digitizing it. And then other ideas I have is that because the heartbeat sound was happening on other tapes too, whether it was related to someone tapping on a microphone or some kind of like something happening in the room, unrelated to the technology, but close enough that it was getting caught. And then, you know, because of that shift to the static background noise, it kind of made that whole committing to one version of this what the heartbeat was really difficult.\n(06:38)\tElla Jando-Saul \tMhmm.\n(06:39)\tMisha Solomon \tYou know, based on the pattern and the inconsistency of the noise, I think we can be relatively sure that the heartbeat sound isn’t actually a heartbeat, but it is difficult for me to separate the sound from being a heartbeat. That’s what it feels like somehow. If I try to think about it logically while listening, I suppose it could be a metronome, but it does lack the regular rhythm. Or as others have said, something accidental, microphone feedback or a mechanical issue with the recording device. \nBut I keep going back to the idea that there is something so corporeal about the sound. Something like akin to listening to a whale from inside of a whale’s belly.\n(07:24)\tMathieu Aubin\tHmm. I like that irregularity that you’re pointing to. I hear this, and to me also, I don’t know what it is that we’re thinking, like is it a stethoscope? There we go. You know, listening for someone’s heartbeat is, it’s what it sounds like to me. \nAnd it’s interesting that we have a similar experience of listening to that and identifying that as that kind of sound, but like Misha just said, it’s irregular. So if somebody’s heartbeat is indeed that, I don’t know that that’s probably the best thing for them. So for me, you know, I’m thinking about this and listening to this and it seems like it could be intentional, it could be not intentional. Sometimes because of the rhythm of like, I’m thinking of like tape moving around and maybe bumping that sort of irregularity also could be a technological sound that’s being emitted.\n(08:26)\tElla Jando-Saul \tI mean, Imeasure the intervals of the heartbeats and I do have to say like, I hope this is a whale and not a human, because if it’s a whale, I mean, I’d have to find out what a regular whale heart rhythm is, but for a human like this, this human’s in a coma or something, I don’t know, it’s way too slow for a human and it is a little bit irregular. There will be moments where it sort of slowly gets a bit faster and then it starts getting a lot faster right before it sort of cuts and then you have applause. \nSort of having done that, I’m rethinking my thought about it being just like the tape sort of spinning and that sort of circularity doesn’t really make sense with the way that it’s shifting around. Like, if it was just slight shifts, it would be like, okay, well tape can’t be at the perfectly same speed all the time. But I think especially that bit where it really speeds up, I’m thinking, okay, maybe it’s intentional if it’s doing this, but in that case, why are there all of these silent moments with just a heartbeat?\n[Sound effect of heartbeat begins to play]\nNone of us know much about how sound recording works. So in an attempt to find some answers, we consulted James Healy, the AMP lab coordinator at Concordia University.\n(09:42)\tJames Healy \tThe next one was like the metronome, or what I would describe as a metronome. It could have been like in one of those old school drum machines that were made to accompany an organ in church, because it was just like a simple “pum-pum pum-pum-”\n(09:59)\tElla Jando-Saul \t[Interjecting] -Yeah-\n(10:00)\tJames Healy \t-pattern, but like the timbre reminded me of like a Roland 808 a lot, which made me think that it’s maybe the same chip as the Roland 808, but a little earlier, because I don’t think that they’re using sort of like this staple hip hop drum machine in the background. I think they’d just be using a fairly rudimentary one, because they just need it for a fairly simple task.\n(10:27)\tElla Jando-Saul \tJames answered the question we had been laboring over pretty quickly, but he had more to say about these recordings.\n(10:34)\tJames Healy\tThere was a really high noise floor in one of them. And then the voice was also saturating sooner than it was in the others, which made me think that it was a different time altogether because they had basically set up a whole bunch of new equipment.\n(10:51)\tArchival Audio from Alan Lord Archive [Unknown Speaker] 2\tBecause it cruises hovering, long snouted crocodilian because it is primitive. \nThank you. [Audience claps]\n(11:24)\tArchival Audio from Alan Lord Archive  [Unknown Speaker] 3\t[Sound effect of heartbeat plays] What’s wrong with this?… governments have been lobbied more effectively by proponents of the arms race than the advocates of the peace movement? [Sound effect of heartbeat ends] \n(11:39)\tJames Healy\tAnd what I mean by new noise floors, there’s like a “chhhhhh” and it was closer to the level of the voice than it was in the other pieces of audio. Yeah, I think the next thing that interested me, like in audio to audio and knowing that maybe it was a different room was just literally like the reflection times of the room that I was hearing. Like, I can’t be like that’s a five millisecond reflection, but it’s just like, it sounds different. The room, the reverb, right? Like  you can tell when you’re just mostly getting a direct source.\n(12:21)\tArchival Audio from Alan Lord Archive [Unknown Speaker] 3\t[Sound effect of heartbeat plays]\nWhat’s wrong with this?… governments have been lobbied more effectively…[Sound effect of heartbeat ends]\n(12:25)\tJames Healy \tOr if you’re getting some room reflections bled into the direct source as well.\n(12:32)\tArchival Audio from Alan Lord Archive [Unknown Speaker] 2\tBecause it cruises hovering, long snouted crocodilian because it is primitive. \n(12:36)\tJames Healy \tAll living things with ears are really good at that. They listen for reflection times to know what type of space they’re in.\n(12:43)\tElla Jando-Saul\tThe digitized tape labeled U22  is split into multiple files labeled from T01 to T02. The recordings cut suddenly from one performance to the next, often starting and stopping in the middle of the performance. \nDuring our conversation, James and I started to piece these together chronologically thanks to recordings done by CBC’s Brave New Waves team, also held in Concordia’s ultimatum collection, which recorded the whole evening from start to finish with no cuts. This helped us figure out that the poet using the heartbeat sound was Tom Kenyvesh, an experimental performance and video poet who had recently moved from Montreal to Vancouver. \nOkay. So your guess would be that like what we have with the U22 recordings that sound really close up is that he’s recording these sort of offsite and then bringing them in to play them. \nIn that case, like, does it make sense that there are parts of the same event from that day before this? So it’s like Christopher Dudney live and then it cuts and then it’s Tom Kenyvesh sounding very not live. And then on T06 it’s just heartbeat sounds which are playing in the background, um, of T07, which is back to Tom Kenyvesh speaking, but now we hear like the audience, it sounds very live and then it cuts and it’s Bill Bisit, same event.\n(14:22)\tJames Healy \tYeah. Well that did confuse me, but then Jason mentioned in an email that they actually had like eight tracks on that tape, so that made me think that they possibly used two of the tracks just to record stuff for playback.\nAnd then they just use the other two tracks to record what was going on live in the room, you know? So, and then essentially what you could do is you could take the two tracks that are already recorded, so you want to go out to the PA with them and you could play them via like their own output to the PA while you record on another two tracks what they’re saying. \nSo it could have been a simultaneous thing and they could have just prepped the two recorded tracks, like beforehand.\n(15:48)\tMisha Solomon\t[Sound effect of heartbeat begins to play] \nWhat I find really interesting about the mystery of the sound is that it’s a reminder of the missing information on these tapes. That these tapes are representative of performances that involved some visual aspect and that that aspect is missing entirely. \nAnd so even when the sound changes or disappears, one could imagine someone in an outrageous outfit playing a percussion instrument in the corner and producing that sound. And we’d never know of that person’s existence unless we found photographic or video evidence. But it would significantly change the tenor of the performance were we to be able to see this producer of the sound if the sound is in fact being produced by someone on stage accompanying the performer, let’s say. \nAnd so it’s just interesting to think about the fact that Ultimatum was this full sense live event, one that even seemed to prioritize the visual in terms of screens being available for performers and all that. But here we’re experiencing it only as audio, which is a kind of mutation of the event into something that is only available to us using one sense. So the sound is an invitation to theorize and that invitation can either be fruitful or, you know, can lead the listener astray down paths to which answers might not be found.\n(17:17)\tSophia Magliocca\tYeah. I love when we think about our project in that way, like that distance that we have in a way retains the privacy of the event, but also invites us in and gives us that intimacy in a really different sensory experience or in a limited one. And when I think about the heartbeat in that way, and whether it’s intentional or not, it does force the listener to really turn or return interior, accept the sound for what it is. \nAnd for a moment it was really nice that we just got to sit and really think about what it could be without having any definitive answers. And think about how it was complimenting the poem and how it was complimenting our experience, you know, so many years down the line of taking that with the limited resources that we have. \nAnd it’s always interesting to have, you know, the real technical terms for what’s going on. But sitting in that mystery, I find, brought us closer and really gave us an opportunity to distinguish the voices and distinguish the settings in a way that, and in a depth that we didn’t always apply to all the other recordings. And this gave us a way into that.\n(18:20)\tElla Jando-Saul \tMm-hmm. And sitting with the mystery, but also just sitting with the sound, however fragmentary it is that we have left to us, is sort of itself an art piece so that whether the heartbeat is intentional or not, it creates this really great experience. Like it is wonderful to hear with the poem regardless of where it comes from.\n(18:44)\tMathieu Aubin\tAnd I love the way that it’s formatted and structured as an art piece, as a poem where these powerful, impactful lines are read and then they’re interspersed with [Sound effect of heartbeat begins to play] these like “bum bums” in the effect of that. And how we’re sitting with that sort of message while trying to figure out that mystery the whole time.\n(19:11)\tArchival Audio from Alan Lord Archive [Unknown Speaker] 4\tForgive everything, walk, don’t run, post no bills, leave no fingerprints. In case of emergency stand still, press return. Please don’t touch. [Long pause] Push. \n[Heartbeat fades slowly] \n(20:14)\tKatherine McLeod \t[ShortCuts Theme Music plays] You’ve been listening to ShortCuts. This episode of ShortCuts was produced by Ella Jando-Saul. You also heard the voices of Mathieu Aubin, Sophia Magliocca, Misha Solomon, and input from Rowan Nancarrow. Also a special thanks to James Healy. ShortCuts is a deep dive into archival audio distributed monthly on the SpokenWeb podcast feed. It is mixed and mastered by Miranda Eastwood, transcribed by Zoe Mix and written and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening.\n[ShortCuts Theme music ends] "],"score":6.2313833}]