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IMC 2013: Sessions

Session 909: Remembered Places & Invented Traditions: Thinking about the Holy Land in the Later Middle Ages - A Round Table Discussion

Tuesday 2 July 2013, 19.30-20.30

Sponsor:AHRC Network 'Remembered Places and Invented Traditions: Thinking about the Holy Land in the Late Medieval West', Birkbeck, University of London
Organiser:Anthony Bale, Department of English & Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London
Moderator/Chair:Anthony Bale, Department of English & Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London
Abstract

The Latin Christian kingdom of Jerusalem was established by Crusaders in the Holy Land in 1099. European noblemen, clerics, pilgrims, converts, and others established a state based around the conquest of Jerusalem, with new castles and fortresses, cathedrals, and cities. The Latin Kingdom endured for fewer than two hundred years; Jerusalem was taken by Saladin in 1187, and the last possession of the Crusaders, the coastal city of Acre, was gained by the Mamluks in 1291.

Our research network has explored the European memory of the Crusades and cultural consequences of the loss of the Latin Kingdom in the centuries after 1291. As Jerusalem and the Holy Land once more came under Islamic control, European culture had to re-imagine its relationship to holy sites and especially to Jerusalem, the 'centre' or 'navel' of the known world.

Far from abandoning its desire for Jerusalem and the Holy Land, Western Europe - Christian and non-Christian - besieged the Holy Land with an array of cultural and imaginative artefacts in the post-crusade era. These artefacts are the focus of this research project and include:

• travel narratives
• pilgrimage itineraries
• maps
• Islamophobia, antisemitism, nationalism, and prehistories of 'Orientalism' and 'Occidentalism'
• architectural copies and simulacra
• renewed calls to Crusade and the rhetoric of crusading

In our round table discussion we will be sharing insights from our own research in this area and consider the different methodological questions such research has presented.

Paricipants include Michele Campopiano (University of York), Andrew T. Jotischky (Lancaster University), Rob Lutton (University of Nottingham), Marianne O'Doherty (University of Southampton), Jan Vandeburie (University of Kent), and Hanna Josephine Vorholt (University of York).