Memory and interpretation: new approaches to the study of the crusades
2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 40; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/03044181.2014.916892
ISSN1873-1279
AutoresMegan Cassidy‐Welch, Anne E. Lester,
Tópico(s)Global Maritime and Colonial Histories
ResumoAbstractThis article describes the connection between studies of memory and the history of the crusades. The authors argue that integrating memory into crusades scholarship offers new ways of exploring the aftermath of war, the construction of cultural memory, the role of women and families in this process, and the crusading movement itself. The article draws on and extends recent trends in crusade scholarship that understand the crusades as a broad religious movement that called upon and developed within a cultural framework that was wider than previously acknowledged. It examines the historical and theoretical development of memory studies and then outlines the recent historiography of crusading studies. The article then introduces a series of essays, which together examine the creation, communication and dissemination of crusade memory.Keywords: crusadesmemoryhistoriographywar Notes1 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 53.2 Malcolm Barber and Keith Bate, ed. and trans., Letters from the East: Crusaders, Pilgrims and Settlers in the 12th–13th Centuries (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 99.3 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: a Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) (first published 1990); eadem, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Carruthers drew on and significantly expanded the work of Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).4 Amy G. Remensnyder, Remembering Kings Past: Monastic Foundation Legends in Medieval Southern France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). For other studies of memory and monastic foundations, see Elizabeth Freeman, Narratives of a New Order: Cistercian Historical Writing in England, 1150–1220 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002); and Susan Boynton, Shaping a Monastic Identity: Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000–1125 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).5 Patrick Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).6 Geary also shows how these practices were deeply gendered. See also Elisabeth van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe 900–1200 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999); eadem, Medieval Memories. Men, Women and the Past 700–1300 (London: Longman, 2001). Lucie Doležalova, ed., The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2009), collects essays dealing with both memory as a tool of cognition and a means of reconstructing the past.7 For an overview of the Annales school, see Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: the Annales School, 1929–1989 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). For reflections on method from some of the key figures, see Georges Duby, L'histoire continue (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 1991); Fernand Braudel, Écrits sur l'histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1969); and Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft trans. Peter Putnam (London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954).8 M. Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: F. Alcan, 1925); idem, La mémoire collective, ed. J. Alexandre (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1950); idem, La topographie légendaire des évangiles en Terre Sainte: étude de mémoire collective (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1941).9 Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 38.10 Pierre Nora, dir., Les lieux de mémoire. 7 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–92), available in English as idem, Realms of Memory: the Construction of the French Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–8); idem, ‘Between Memory and History: les lieux de mémoire’, Representations 26 (1989): 7–24.11 Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 46.12 Pierre Nora, ‘General Introduction: Between Memory and History’, in idem, Realms of Memory, 1: 6.13 Indeed, the pioneers and products of the Annales generation were generally and personally profoundly affected by war. Halbwachs himself died in Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945, Braudel was imprisoned in 1940 and Marc Bloch was shot by the Gestapo in 1944. For a moving reflection on his part in recent events and his testamentary instructions, see Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat: a Statement of Evidence written in 1940, trans., Gerard Hopkins (New York: W.W. Norton, 1968); for an account of his memories of service in the First World War, see Marc Bloch, Souvenirs de Guerre, 1914–1918 (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1969).14 Allen Frantzen, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).15 Stefan Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).16 See Daniel Sherman, ‘Bodies and Names: the Emergence of Commemoration in Interwar France’, American Historical Review 103 (1998): 443–66; Annette Becker, La guerre et la foi. De la mort à la mémoire, 1914–1918 (Paris: Arnand Colin, 1994); and Martin Conway, Catholic Politics in Europe, 1918–1945 (London: Routledge, 1997).17 Jay Winter, ‘The Memory Boom in Contemporary Historical Studies’, Raritan 21, no. 1 (2001): 52–66.18 Alan Confino, ‘History and Memory’, in The Oxford History of Historical Writing, eds. Axel Schneider and Daniel Woolf. 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 5: 36–51. For an impassioned critique of wartime forgetting, see W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. A. Bell (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003).19 T.G. Ashplant, Graeme Dawson and Michael Roper, The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration (London: Routledge, 2000).20 For memory and nationalisms in Western European contexts, see, inter alia, Nora, Les lieux de mémoire; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). For memory and modernity, see the essays in Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and Daniel Levy, eds., The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 399–480 (‘Memory, Justice and the Contemporary Epoch’). For useful overviews of recent trends in memory studies, see both Cubitt, History and Memory, and Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz, eds., Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010).21 Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). Some historians of the Hundred Years' War have found in that long series of conflicts the beginnings of national identifications. See Colette Beaune, Naissance de la nation France (Paris: Gallimard, 1985); and C.T. Allmand, ed., Society at War: the Experience of England and France During the Hundred Years War. 2nd edn. (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998).22 Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, eds., War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Jay Winter, Remembering War: the Great War and Historical Memory in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); idem, ‘Memory Boom’; Kerwin Lee Klein, ‘On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse’, Representations 69 (2000): 127–50.23 Giles Constable, ‘The Historiography of the Crusades’, in The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World, eds. Angeliki E. Laiou and Roy Parviz Mottahedeh (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2001), 1–22 (22).24 Constable, ‘Historiography of the Crusades’, 10–17. For an overview of these historiographical trends, see Christopher Tyerman, The Debate on the Crusades, 1099–2010 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011); and idem, The Crusades: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Tyerman also grapples with the definition of a crusade in Christopher Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998).25 Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, especially 41–53.26 Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 52–3.27 On this metaphor see Nicholas Paul, To Follow in Their Footsteps: the Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 21–53. As Paul and others have noted, the idea of following in the footsteps of one's predecessors was a central concept of Pope Eugenius III's bull, Quantum praedecessores, which called the Second Crusade in 1145. See Jonathan Phillips, The Second Crusade: Extending the Frontiers of Christendom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 37–60; and William Purkis, Crusading Spirituality in the Holy Land and Iberia, c.1095–c.1187 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008). See also the discussion of these terms in Jay Rubenstein, ‘Putting History to Use: Three Crusade Chronicles in Context’, Viator 35 (2004): 131–68.28 On the role of memory in crusade history and historiography, see Paul, To Follow in Their Footsteps, and Nicholas Paul and Suzanne Yeager, eds., Remembering the Crusades: Myth, Image, and Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 1–11. See also Elma Brenner, Meredith Cohen and Mary Franklin-Brown, eds., Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).29 For an overview of these kinds of projects pursued during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Constable, ‘Historiography of the Crusades’, 7–10; and Tyerman, Debate on the Crusades.30 One thinks of the work of Benjamin Kadar, James Powell, John Pryor, Joseph Strayer, Kirt Witzmann and later William Chester Jordan. It was in this vein of re-reading and re-thinking that Jonathan Riley-Smith could put forward the provocative title ‘Crusading as an Act of Love’, History 65 (1980): 177–92, an essay which transformed the scholarship on crusader motivations.31 This trend has also yielded new critical editions and translations of chronicles and other crusade narratives. See, for example, Ashgate's series Crusade Texts in Translation, begun in 1996. Most recently, see Sarah Lambert and Helen J. Nicholson, eds., Languages of Love and Hate: Conflict, Communication, and Identity in the Medieval Mediterranean (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012).32 Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders, 1095–1131 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Marcus Bull, Knightly Piety and the Lay Response to the First Crusade: the Limousin and Gascony, c.970–c.1130 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).33 While many scholars have written in these terms, notably Paul Alphandéry and Alphonse Dupront, La chrétienté et l'idée de croisade. 2 vols. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1954–9); more recently, see Gary Dickson, The Children's Crusade: Medieval History, Modern Mythistory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and Purkis, Crusading Spirituality.34 The outpouring of scholarship in this vein is considerable. We list here only a few exemplary works: Adrian J. Boas, Crusader Archaeology: the Material Culture of the Latin East (London: Routledge, 1999); idem, Domestic Settings: Sources on Domestic Architecture and Day-To-Day Activities in the Crusader States (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Jaroslav Folda, The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1098–1187 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); idem, Crusader Art in the Holy Land: From the Third Crusade to the Fall of Acre, 1187–1291 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and William Chester Jordan, ‘The Representation of the Crusades in the Songs Attributed to Thibaud, Count Palatine of Champagne’, Journal of Medieval History 25 (1999): 27–34. On the liturgy, see M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, ‘Origins and Development of the Pilgrimage and Cross Blessings in the Roman Pontificals of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’, Mediaeval Studies 73 (2011): 261–86; and eadem, ‘From Pilgrimage to Crusade: the Liturgy of Departure, 1095–1300’, Speculum 88 (2013): 44–91. On preaching, see Penny J. Cole, The Preaching of the Crusades to the Holy Land, 1095–1270 (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1991); Christoph T. Maier, Preaching the Crusades: Mendicant Friars and the Cross in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and idem, Crusade Propaganda and Ideology: Model Sermons for the Preaching of the Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).35 For example, Sharon Farmer wrote that ‘since 9/11/01, … my scholarly priorities have been transformed: I wish to explore not only gender relations but also relations between the predominantly Christian West and the predominantly non-Christian East. And because propagandists both then and now justify armed conflict by highlighting differences, I seek those places where apparent opposites turn out to be quite similar, where hidden desires blur the boundaries separating “us” from “them”’, in Sharon Farmer, ‘Low Country Ascetics and Oriental Luxury: Jacques de Vitry, Marie of Oignies, and the Treasures of Oignies’, in History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person, eds. Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 205–22 (205). Even more explicit in its aims in this regard is Bruce W. Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2007).36 See the discussion in Christoph T. Maier, ‘The Roles of Women in the Crusade Movement: a Survey’, Journal of Medieval History 30 (2004): 61–82, as well as Susan Edgington and Sarah Lambert, eds., Gendering the Crusades (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001), and Natasha R. Hodgson, Women, Crusading and the Holy Land in Historical Narrative (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007). Recent studies that have focused on the family grew out of this new vein of scholarship: see Paul, To Follow in Their Footsteps, and Jochen Schenk, Templar Families: Landowning Families and the Order of the Temple in France, ca.1120–1307 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).37 For example, the 2004 special issue of Gesta – Robert Ousterhout and D. Fairchild Ruggles, eds., Encounters with Islam. Gesta 43, no. 2 (2004) – grew out of a symposium held in April 2003 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign entitled ‘Encounters with Islam: the Medieval Mediterranean Experience’. See also Thomas F. Madden, ed., The Fourth Crusade: Event, Aftermath, and Perceptions: Papers from the Sixth Conference of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East, Istambul, Turkey, 25–29 August 2004 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); Paul and Yeager, eds., Remembering the Crusades. And as this present issue went to press (March 2014), the International Symposium on Crusade Studies convened at Saint Louis University for a conference on the theme ‘Crusades: Medieval Worlds in Conflict’, and the 34th Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval Studies at Fordham University addressed the topic of ‘The French of Outremer: Communities and Communications in the Crusading Mediterranean’.Additional informationMegan Cassidy-Welch is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the History Department at Monash University, Australia.Anne E. Lester is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
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