The City Lament

Drawing on texts in Latin, Arabic, and Armenian, this innovative study takes the shared tradition of lamentations over the city of Jerusalem as a window onto the complex cultural politics of the eastern Mediterranean in the so-called age of crusades. Reading with a literary critic's eye for nuances of style, convention, and intertextual allusion, Tamar Boyadjian shows the historical and historiographical stakes of the shifting representations of Jerusalem in the century from the First Crusaders' conquest of 1099 to the founding of the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia at the close of the twelfth century and beyond. -- Sharon Kinoshita, Professor of Literature and Co-Director of the Center for Mediterranean Studies, UC Santa Cruz Tamar M. Boyadjian's book is an impressive, unique, and original work of scholarship in several ways that make significant, imaginative contributions to fields of and approaches to the study of medieval literary and religious culture. This refreshingly global approach to the literary history of the genre establishes the context for the study's cross-cultural, multilingual, and multi-religious study of crusading era lament over Jerusalem. -- Adnan A. Husain, Associate Professor of History, Queen's University, Kingston The City Lament is an important and well-conceived study that will make a significant contribution to the field. Boyadjian widens our frame of reference by bringing in the enormously significant Kingdom of Armenia, enhancing our understanding of this crucial period of history. -- Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Professor of English and Medieval Studies, and Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto