Maeve Hickey here explores the powerful interaction of people and place at the core of pilgrimage. In the Marian sites at Knock and Lourdes and in Padre Poi's San Giovanni, the sacred personages overpower the natural landscape, and church institutions produce a steady stream of religious objects: exportable versions of the pilgrimage experience. The photographs reveal the importance of pilgrimage to nationalism from Ireland's association with the mountain on which its patron saint, Patrick, spent a Mosaic month battling evil to what we might call the local nationalisms' of Maltese towns people with their joyful devotion to their own saint. The images also reveal the often gendered character of pilgrimages, whether in the preponderance of women and their particular quests in some of the international pilgrimages, or in the intensely performed masculinities of Croagh Patrick mountaineers and white-robed carriers of the Maltese saints.

This book explores the religious lives of Catholic women in Vila Branca (a pseudonym), a small town on the north coast of Portugal. The study deals with various facets of Catholic religious life, such as the cult of the saints and the Virgin Mary; death-related practices; the material culture of Catholicism; pilgrimage journeys; and the ambiguous relationship between women and priests. The author argues that in order to understand the processes that underlie these religious phenomena, it is crucial to understand the actual role of women.

Two parallel, interrelated waves of interest in pilgrimage on foot has surged in Sweden since the 1990s: participation in the international Camino pilgrimage and a vernacular pilgrimage movement in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Sweden. In this article, the interconnections between the two strands are explored. In both settings, attention is paid primarily to walking itself, illustrating a key facet of Caminoization: the stress on the journey rather than the destination. It is argued here that the pilgrimage walks in the Church of Sweden are modeled on a Caminoized notion of pilgrimage, built into the Swedish word pilgrimsvandring. This notion of pilgrimage functions as an open category that can connect to both religious heritages and social and cultural trends in new ways. A key outcome of the spread of Caminoized pilgrimage is the rise of a pilgrim spirituality that celebrates simplicity and communing with nature, and carries with it a cultural critique of postindustrial society, further accentuated in the pilgrimage movement’s recent turn to ecology and climate action.

This article discusses the meanings ascribed to the pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Fátima by mainly female Portuguese pilgrims. The article builds on ethnographic fieldwork in Vila Branca, a small pseudonymous town on the northwestern coast of Portugal. The author shows how women’s interpretation of the Fátima shrine is deeply embedded in local forms of Marian devotion, in particular the practice of making vows to Mary. It is argued that the vow can be understood as a healing ritual (carried out by both women and men) and that the predominance of female pilgrims at Fátima mirrors their responsibilities as mothers and housewives to secure the health and well-being of others. The article describes a typical, popular pilgrimage journey from Vila Branca to Fátima, undertaken by bus in a large group. The journey includes various elements of the typical Portuguese festa, as well as the ritual reenactment of Mary’s apparition in a farewell ceremony manifesting the materiality and visual aspects of popular religious experience. Furthermore, the author discusses the various tensions between orthodox and popular interpretations of Fátima, one of which centers around the belief in the materialization of divine power in the form of an ordinary woman.

The author of this article discusses the ways in which gender equality and intersectionality are understood and enacted in two recent feminist campaigns in Sweden that use similar techniques to mobilise support for different causes. The first campaign is the so-called Hijab Call-to-Action, a solidarity action that took place in 2013 in which women in Sweden wore a hijab (the Muslim headscarf) for one day in defence of Muslim women's rights. This campaign manifests the ways in which the notion of gender equality brings with it a norm of secularity, but also how the equation of equality and secularity is contested. The second feminist campaign discussed is the so-called Pussy Bow Blouse manifestation that aimed at taking a stand in the controversies surrounding the Swedish Academy as a result of the Metoo campaign in Sweden. The author looks at the political and discursive processes enfolded in these campaigns as a sort of collective learning processes that connect feminist activism and scholarship. A key concern is to critically analyse a binary model of powerless versus gender-equal or feminist women that figure in both debates. Further, the author shows that both campaigns appeal to solidarity through identification, but at the same time underscore the contingent and coalitional nature of identity in the act of dressing in a scarf or a blouse to take on a (political) identity for a day.