IMC 2023: Sessions

Recent scholarship has begun to unpack the complex intertextualities at play in Latin Christian narratives of the crusades, with especial focus being placed on what scriptural allusion and exegesis can reveal about these texts as both narrative constructs and cultural artefacts. The papers in this session continue the work of teasing out these entangled intertextualities by focusing on the role of classical authorities and other crusades sources in crusade narrative. Paper -a will ask how Fulcher of Chartres and Jacques de Vitry integrated classical authorities on the environments of the Levant (such as Flavius Josephus and Pliny the Elder) into their accounts, and consider the role of these textual entanglements in their narrative projects. Paper -b will examine the account of the First Crusade found in William of Tyre's Chronicon. In particular, it will explore which existing narratives were available to William as he composed his text as well as the ways in which he then sought to incorporate and combine their words and themes into his own version. Paper -c will explore entangled ideas of spiritual and physical health in the Itinerarium Peregrinorum et gesta Regis Ricardi and in papal crusade calls of the late 12th and early 13th century. It will focus on textual environments in which spiritual and physical health were presented as significant, and consider how the crusader's body was used to shape and promote changing ideologies of crusading.