Three literary texts of pilgrimage from the 14th to the 17th century , namely The Travels of Sir John Mandeville , The Canterbury Tales and The Pilgrim's Progress , built a three-dimensional space of pilgrimage-travel in English literature . These three texts span from the West to the East ,from the domestic to the exotic and from the interior to the exterior .They started a long narrative tradition where the Holy Land and alien miracles coexist , the Christian worldview and the pagan beliefs mirror each other , and the pious religious faith and the low profane desires intertwine . It is this tradition of British pilgrimage literature that exerted influence on and gave impetus to the rise of modern English travel literature with the gradual formation of its space imagination , subject consciousness , principles of cross-cultural communication and correspondingly its narrative strategies and structural patterns .In this sense , the pilgrimage literature may be considered the spiritual nucleus of English and European travel literature .