"In the course of time the Easter dance came [for a period] to be directed to and confined within the labyrinths that were set within the nave of the church, at least at several of the cathedrals of northern France. We do not know exactly where or when this first occurred. What can be said with certainty is that all of the extant references to the use of the labyrinth in the church prior to the seventeenth century pertain to the ceremony of the Easter dance and no other."
. . .
"Most guidebooks explain the presence of the maze on a cathedral floor in something like the following terms: 'In the Middle Ages the labyrinth served as a place where devout souls carried out a vicarious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, praying as they followed the path of the maze on their knees.' . . . Is there truth to this claim that the maze entered the church as a site for substitute pilgrimage? None at all.
"In fact, the church maze was used as a place of fictive pilgrimage not at the beginning of its history, but at its end. The two earliest documents to refer to the labyrinth as a 'path to Jerusalem' date from the late eighteenth century" and refer back to a "ritual . . . performed at Chartres" no earlier than the seventeenth century.
. . .
"During the sixteenth century . . . the labyrinth lost some of the Christological associations it had acquired during the Middle Ages. It became, as it once was long ago with the patristic fathers, a simple [and almost purely literary?] metaphor for the route along which the solitary soul must pass. . . . [T]he maze evolved from a medieval symbol of noisy Hell and Purgatory to a post-Reformation place of quiet, where a more personal, possibly nonsectarian experience might take place. . . . This maze has no demonic center. There is no implication of a round-trip journey by Christ. There are neither militaristic nor eucharistic overtones. There are no praises to martyrs of the Christian cause. This maze has no special relevance to the season of Easter. The pilgrim may set forth to Jerusalem at any time.
"As he does so, he will find himself alone. In this early-modern maze, the emphasis has shifted from a collective symbol seen from without to an object for individual meditation experienced from within. We should recall that there are no records attesting to, or even suggesting, a personal journey on a church maze prior to the seventeenth century. [Though I (Steve Perisho) find some of Wright's interpretative work speculative, too,] All earlier accounts speak of clerics dancing on the maze or processing across it on Easter as part of the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church. Allusions to a meditative experience for laymen begin to appear only in the seventeenth century. Not coincidentally, it is in this period that the 'pilgrim on the maze' sets forth in emblem books in the West." Etc.
Craig Wright, The maze and the warrior: symbols in architecture, theology, and music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 138 (chap. 5, The Dance of the Maze), all italics and underscoring mine, and then 208-210 and 213 and following.
That was in 2001. In 2004 Connolly challenged this, asserting that "We should not let [the absence of] texts do all of our [art-historical] work for us" ("At the center of the world: the labyrinth pavement of Chartres cathedral," in Art and architecture of late medieval pilgrimage in northern Europe and the British Isles, ed. Sarah Blick & Rita Teppike, Studies in medieval and Reformation traditions: history, culture, religion, ideas 104 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 293n25)). I have yet to grapple fully with the serious argument made by Connolly, or with any other serious counter-arguments for that matter, but my point is that too much of what "the 'ecumenicalists' of the New Age" (Wright, 271) have claimed for the purpose and use of the large pavement maze (the relatively time- and space-bound occurrence of that phenomenon) in the history of Christian spirituality seems to have been theoretical at best and fanciful at worst, or, in other words, perfectly contestable.
