IMC 2021: Sessions
Session 2104: Historical Writing, the Crusades, and the Latin East, II: New Approaches to William of Tyre's Historia
Friday 9 July 2021, 11.15-12.45
Organisers: | Andrew David Buck, School of History, Queen Mary University of London James Henry Kane, Medieval & Early Modern Centre, University of Sydney |
---|---|
Moderator/Chair: | Natasha Ruth Hodgson, School of Arts & Humanities, Nottingham Trent University |
Paper 2104-a | William of Tyre, the First Crusade, and the Creation of Outre-Mer (Language: English) Index terms: Crusades, Historiography - Medieval, Language and Literature - Latin |
Paper 2104-b | Othering the Self: Orientalism and Latin Identity in William of Tyre's Historia Hierosolymitana (Language: English) Index terms: Crusades, Historiography - Medieval, Language and Literature - Latin |
Paper 2104-c | The Manners, Lives, and Personal Appearance of Kings: William of Tyre's Modelling of Kingship and Masculinity (Language: English) Index terms: Crusades, Historiography - Medieval, Language and Literature - Latin |
Abstract | The papers in this session offer fresh scrutiny of the diverse sources for the crusades and the Latin East, and demonstrate the value of utilising different methodological frameworks, such as narrative theory, to interrogate texts in the broader context of medieval historical writing. All three papers in this session focus on one particular text: the Historia (or Chronicon) of William of Tyre. Paper A offers some preliminary findings on William's text for the First Crusade, in particular his use of sources and his attempts to encode the crusader conquests with an underlying rationale and model for Latin power in the East. Paper B presents a literary examination of Jerusalemite identity in William of Tyre's Historia by exploring how the author presents an ideal 'Self'-image both by contrasting it to several (Eastern) 'Others' (Turks, Greeks, Egyptians) and through comparison with the memory of former generations. Paper C explores the narrative intertwining of kingship and masculinity by examining William of Tyre's accounts of the rulers of Jerusalem, in particular Kings Baldwin III and Amalric, and considers what this can tell us about contemporary ideologies of both gender and rulership, as well as the expectations placed on kings. |