Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative

2013

Of all the holy places to which Latin Christian pilgrims journeyed during the Middle Ages, none was more holy and more spiritually venerated than the city of Jerusalem. 1 However, Jerusalem was no mere city. As the site not only of the Passion but also of myriad other biblical stories and artifacts, Jerusalem occupied a unique ontological centrality within Latin Christian cosmology. 2 In the words of Basit Hammad Qureshi is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota. He specializes in the political culture of western France and the Near East during the long twelfth century. His dissertation investigates developments in the exercise and understanding of power and authority in the medieval world as a function of the crusading phenomenon, ca.

Зограф - Zograf 39, 2015

Past & Present, 2017

The earliest histories of the First Crusade were informed by the testimonies of combatants who aligned their experiences with available historical models, especially the master narrative of sacred history. Within a few years of the Christian occupation of Jerusalem, and several years before elite monastic chroniclers began their work, laymen and clerics who had participated in the crusade were producing narratives that circulated in small booklets (*libelli*) and other ephemeral formats, influencing public opinion and provoking responses from the ecclesiastical establishment. The documentation inspired by the First Crusade allows us to reconstruct the forms of popular literacy shared by the crusaders and their audiences, the media through which they accessed writing, and their historiographical agency. CORRIGENDA: Since its appearance, I have been alerted to some errors which require correction in a chapter of my forthcoming book, Mediated Texts and Their Makers in Medieval Europe (under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press). I have flagged them here and adjusted my interpretations of the evidence accordingly. I am deeply grateful to Jay Rubenstein for drawing them to my attention.

Comparative Literature Studies, 2021

Tamar M. Boyadjian's The City Lament is an important contribution to medieval Mediterranean studies. Through her analysis of laments over Jerusalem in Latin, Arabic, and Armenian literature, Boyadjian challenges the traditional Crusader framework that often reduces discussions of Jerusalem in the Middle Ages to a Christian-Muslim oppositional binary. In this book, Boyadjian explores how various ethnoreligious cultures in the Mediterranean participated in the tradition of city laments going back to ancient times. Rather than treating literary texts strictly within traditional national boundaries, Boyadjian emphasizes cross-cultural contact in the Mediterranean and demonstrates shared participation in the tradition of city laments across ethnoreligious groups. As she notes, "Using the Mediterranean, rather than the Crusades, as a framework for analysis encourages readings that move beyond European realities; such readings recognize reciprocal exchanges and commonalities across cultures in the period and acknowledge the significance of the impact of Mediterranean networks on literary works that have only been considered within national frameworks in the past" (9). Boyadjian's framing results in readings that illustrate localized uses of motifs that demonstrate commonalities across cultures. Chapter 1 outlines the qualities of lamenting Jerusalem for various ethnoreligious groups active in the Mediterranean and how medieval laments adapted thematic tropes of lamentation from the Hebrew Bible, especially the Book of Lamentations, to their own social and political needs. Motifs of Mesopotamian city laments that influenced the Hebrew Bible are also identified, such as personifying the city as a morally impure woman, attributing the fall to the sins of the inhabitants, and the eventual reconquest of the city. The remainder of the chapter addresses the role and perception of

Merits of Jerusalem (Fada’il al-Quds), which belong to the genre of Islamic sacred geography, constitute a valuable but still under-researched source for studying the memory of the Crusades in the Levant and Egypt after the expulsion of the Crusaders from the Holy Land. Analysis of the most popular works of this genre created after 1291 shows that in the subsequent centuries the theme of the Crusades and the violation of the Islamic sacred spaces by the Franks played an increasingly important role in treatises of this type. In the works from the late 15th c., a comprehensive narrative of the Frankish invasion was established, centered around the struggle for Jerusalem and the figure of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, while contemporary Islamic historiography had not yet developed a comprehensive history of the conflict with the Franks at that point. The works of the period under review also blame the Franks for interrupting the transmission of Islamic knowledge.

The Crusades and Visual Culture, 2015

The rich images of the Riccardiana Psalter (Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, ms. 323) symbolize the significance of Jerusalem in the competing claims of Christians and Muslims in the later Crusader era. Several references to the holy city appear in eight scenes portraying Christ’s life from the Annunciation to the Pentecost. Through details and precise architectural forms, the images allude to actual locations where the events took place, which were also medieval pilgrimage sites. Paradoxically, these sites were in Muslim possession at the time and inaccessible to Christians. The Jerusalem attachment is strengthened by scholars’ association of the psalter with the era of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor (1220-50), in part because it was produced perhaps in ca. 1225 in his Italy or in Acre, then-capital of the Latin Crusader Kingdom (1187-1291) under his and then his son’s control (1225-54). Also, textual evidence within suggests that Frederick’s wife (at most) or a lay noblewoman (at least) with Jerusalem ties was the owner. I suggest that this psalter provided its owner with a virtual replacement for pilgrimage to Holy Land locations, which were special to her, when political circumstances disallowed her from experiencing them herself.

The crusades, whether realized or merely planned, had a profound impact on medieval and early modern societies. Numerous scholars in the fields of history and literature have explored the influence of crusading ideas, values, aspirations and anxieties in both the Latin States and Europe. However, there have been few studies dedicated to investigating how the crusading movement influenced and was reflected in medieval visual cultures. Written by scholars from around the world working in the domains of art history and history, the essays in this volume examine the ways in which ideas of crusading were realized in a broad variety of media (including manuscripts, cartography, sculpture, mural paintings, and metalwork). Arguing implicitly for recognition of the conceptual frameworks of crusades that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, the volume explores the pervasive influence and diverse expression of the crusading movement from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries.

In the early stages of the modern rewriting of medieval Jewish history, the sources most consulted and adduced were narrative. As the enterprise has matured, further source genres have been discovered and utilized, thus allowing for improved understanding of the medieval Jewish experience. Of late, the reliability of narrative sources has come under question, but at the same time these narrative sources have been utilized in new and creative ways. To be sure, both the questioning and the innovative utilization of medieval Jewish narrative sources have been profoundly influenced by similar tendencies among general medievalists, as they seek to refine their tools of historical reconstruction.' 1. Considerations of medieval historical narrative by medievalists include: J. de Ghellinck, L'Essor de la litterature latine au XIIe sidcle, 2 vols. (Brussels, 1946), 2:89-198; M.-D. Chenu, "Theology and the New Awareness of History," Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century, ed. and trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Journal of Semitic Studies 27 (1982): 221-239, and my own discussion of these issues in chap. 2 of my European Jewry and the First Crusade (Berkeley, 1987). In view of my conclusion that the narrative of Eliezer bar Nathan is derivative, I shall focus in this study, as I did in the book, on the truncated narrative and the narrative attributed to Solomon ben Samson. I shall continue to utilize the designations which I used in the book for these two narratives-S for the shorter narrative and L for the lengthier. 3. Among those who have utilized these texts, particularly noteworthy are the insights offered by Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance (Oxford, 1961), pp. 82-92, and Alan Mintz, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (New York, 1984), pp. 84-101.

2021

Bulletin for the Council for British Research in the Levant, 2014

The history of Christian pilgrimage in Syria-Palestine has captivated scholarly and public audiences since the fi rst waves of research in the region in the nineteenth century. This subject continues to generate vibrant debate among scholars of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Central to this discourse is John Wilkinson‛s seminal publication Jerusalem Pilgrims before the Crusades, fi rst published in 1977. This text still offers the most systematic study of descriptions of pilgrimage to the region between the fourth and eleventh centuries, yet in spite of its popularity and central status to the subject, few of the texts collected in Wilkinson‛s volume have received systematic study as literary compositions in their own right, or as products of individual writers and communities. This article offers an overview of issues which have emerged from a preliminary study of one of the texts published in the revised second edition of Jerusalem Pilgrims in 2002: Bede‛s De locis sanctis, a survey of the 'holy land‛ written in Anglo-Saxon Northumbria at the turn of the eighth century.

The Catholic Historical Review, 2013

Medium Aevum, 2011

In the very early fifteenth century, an English preacher, frightened by the desolations of the Hundred Years War, advised his congregation to take stock of the apocalyptic signs around them, and to view themselves in the likeness of the Jewish community under attack by Titus and Vespasian during the first-century Roman siege of Jerusalem. Aligning a late medieval Christian parish with an embattled Jewish community would prove to be an effective rhetorical device that dared its audiences to imagine not only a shared ruin, but also a shared humanity. A few years earlier, the romance entitled "The Siege of Jerusalem" began to circulate in England, dramatizing the events of the first-century siege, and embellishing these happenings with chivalric trappings. By that time, England had already experienced invasions on its shores and limitations on its sea powers imposed by Castilian-French forces, as well as repeated incursions from the north, as Scottish and English troops harassed one another’s borders. In North Yorkshire, where the romance originated, many locals made their living by fighting with Scottish neighbours, and had themselves participated in sieges directly across the English Channel. In exploring the "Siege" poem as an apocalyptic text, I draw attention to an often-overlooked moment nevertheless vital to medieval Christian religious narrative: the interval between the Passion of Christ and the later destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. This forty-year span was interpreted by Christian exegetes as the historical moment when the Jewish people awaited divine vengeance for their role in the Crucifixion. Significantly, this moment would also become an appropriate analogue to the apocalypse. The poet depicts these four decades as heavily freighted with expectation and the trappings of suspense, coming to a crisis point in the siege.The complex presentation of the Jews suggests that the poet and his source saw value in making Jewish figures relatable, thereby inviting the audiences to entertain the possibility of a better fate for the holy city’s citizens. In doing so, the narrative emphasizes this weighty moment between Passion and Vengeance and thereby offers a more nuanced reading of the "Siege" as an apocalyptic text. Certainly the ugly narrative of violence and retribution is present, but the faculty of agency receives special attention in the poem. This article continues my work on Jerusalem and Jewish identities as spaces of premodern Christian affective piety. This piece draws from Christian homiletic and apocalyptic texts which remember the first-century siege alongside Jewish ritual remembrances on the 9th of Av (Tisha b'Av).