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IMC 2022: Sessions

Session 1623: Bordering the Crusades, II: Conceptual Borders

Thursday 7 July 2022, 11.15-12.45

Organisers:Katherine Mortimer, Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London
Beth Spacey, School of History & Cultures, University of Birmingham
Moderator/Chairs:Megan Cassidy-Welch, Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, Monash University, Victoria
Ivo Wolsing, Independent Scholar, Amsterdam
Paper 1623-aLiminal Riverscapes in Latin Christian Crusade Narratives
(Language: English)
Beth Spacey, School of History & Cultures, University of Birmingham
Index terms: Crusades, Historiography - Medieval
Paper 1623-bOn the Fringes of Christian Rhetoric: Reassessing Discourses of Difference in Chronicles of the Early Northern Crusades
(Language: English)
Stanislaw Banach, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge
Index terms: Crusades, Historiography - Medieval
Paper 1623-cThe End of War: Women at the Border of Violence and Crusade in the 13th Century
(Language: English)
Lydia Marie Walker, Department of History, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Index terms: Crusades, Gender Studies, Women's Studies
Abstract

The papers in this panel explore several aspects of conceptual borders in a crusading context. They do this by examining how Christian sources from the late 11th-13th centuries constructed, navigated, and utilised notional boundaries. This panel aims to interrogate the implications of these borders for our understanding of a range of intersecting historical ideas pertaining to rhetoric, identities, space and place, gender, warfare, and other themes. Paper -a draws on a range of texts by Latin Christian authors to argue that riverscapes represent multivalent liminal zones in the environmental imaginaries constructed by crusade narratives. Paper -b examines the rhetoric of difference used to portray 'pagans' in two late 12th-century Christian chronicles of the northern crusades, exploring how these portrayals transgress the borders of standard discourse. Paper -c also scrutinises the nexus between rhetoric and borders to show how the edges of crusading and warfare offered Thomas of Cantimpré the ideal narrative space to convey ambivalence about such endeavours. Consequently, this panel reveals how thinking with theoretical borders in a crusading context can facilitate diverse studies into medieval cultural history.