Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber : $b or, The influence of Romanism on trade, justice, and knowledge.

A traveller crosses the Alps toward Rome, but this is no ordinary journey. Every town and custom is pressed into service of an argument about the Church and its effect on society.

What it's about

Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber is a travel narrative framed as a journey through Italy toward Rome, written to advance a critical thesis about the influence of Roman Catholicism, referred to as Romanism, on trade, justice and knowledge. As the narrator moves southward, observations of the country and its people are marshalled to support the book's polemical case about the effects of the Church on Italian life.

Themes

The work belongs to a nineteenth-century tradition of Protestant controversial writing, in which travel and description serve religious and political argument. Its concerns are the relationship between religion and prosperity, between institutions and liberty, and between faith and the progress of commerce and learning. Reader should note its openly partisan standpoint.

Why it still matters

As a document of Victorian-era religious controversy and anti-Catholic sentiment, the book illuminates a strand of nineteenth-century thought and the way travel writing could be enlisted in confessional debate. It is of interest chiefly to those studying the period's attitudes rather than as a balanced account of Italy.

Who it's for

Students of nineteenth-century religious controversy, readers interested in the history of Protestant-Catholic polemic, and those drawn to travel writing with an argumentative edge. Best read with an awareness of its strong bias.