Crusading was a religious movement involving papal authorization, the incentive of remission of sins, pious motivation on behalf of the individual, and the justification of holy war. Much recent historiography in this area has focused on resolving the questions of what a crusade was, and why people went on them. But crusading became a cultural and social phenomenon that changed across time and geographical space. In turn, crusading was shaped by the ways specific crusades and their participants were remembered in specific historical contexts. Moreover, crusade memory had profound effects on the cultivation of family lineage, kinship ties, national and regional identity, and religious orthodoxy. Integrating memory into crusades scholarship thus offers new ways of exploring the aftermath of war, the construction of cultural and social memory, the role of women and families in this process, and the crusading movement itself.
This book explores memory as a methodological means of understanding the crusades. It engages with theories of communicative memory, social and cultural memory, war commemoration, and historical processes of remembering. Contributions explore the variety of cultural forms used in cultivating crusade memory. Material, visual, liturgical and textual objects are all reflective of crusade culture and the process of crafting its memory, and the analysis of such sources is of particular interest. This publication furthers new trends in crusade scholarship which understand the crusades as a broad religious movement that called upon and developed within a wider cultural framework than previously acknowledged.
This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Medieval History.
1. Memory and interpretation: new approaches to the study of the crusades 2. The echoes of victory: liturgical and para-liturgical commemorations of the capture of Jerusalem in the West 3. True Romans: remembering the crusades among Eastern Christians 4. Constructing memory: holy war in the Chronicle of the Poles by Bishop Vincentius of Cracow 5. In search of the Marshal's lost crusade: the persistence of memory, the problems of history and the painful birth of crusading romance 6. What remains: women, relics and remembrance in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade 7. Memories of the preaching for the Fifth Crusade in Caesarius of Heisterbach's Dialogus miraculorum 8. ‘O Damietta’: war memory and crusade in thirteenth-century Egypt 9. Playing at crusading: cultural memory and its (re)creation in Jean Bodel's Jeu de St Nicolas
Megan Cassidy-Welch holds an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship in the History Department at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Her work particularly concerns space and memory in thirteenth-century cultural, social and religious history. Anne E. Lester is an Associate Professor in the History Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA. Her work focuses on religious and social history during the high Middle Ages with a particular emphasis on gender, materiality and devotion.
