Memory and Interpretation: New Approaches to the Study of the Crusades (original) (raw)
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Crusade Narratives: The Cause and Effect of Remembrance
2018
The 53rd Annual International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, MI, May 2018). There are many surviving documents which recount the persecution of the medieval Jews of western Christendom. Some of the most remarkable of these documents are the Hebrew and Latin crusade narratives which describe the plight of the Jews in the midst of the Rhineland massacres. Although the Latin and Hebrew texts paint a similar time-bound picture, the Hebrew texts serve as a timeless justification of the non-normative actions performed by the Jewry in the Rhineland. The purpose of this paper is to explain how the Hebrew Crusade narratives theologically justified the ritual suicides of the Rhineland Jewry, sufficiently recorded the history of the actual events once coupled with the Latin narratives, gave substance to blood libel accusations, and created a narrative of remembrance.
Tales of the Crusaders – Remembering the Crusades in Britain
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Engaging the Crusades The Memory and Legacy of Crusading Engaging the Crusades is a series of volumes that offer initial windows into the ways in which the crusades have been used in the last two centuries, demonstrating that the memory of the crusades is an important and emerging subject. Together, these studies suggest that the memory of the crusades, in the modern period, is a productive, exciting, and much needed area of investigation.
What Remains: Women, Relics and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade
After the fall of Constantinople to the Latin Crusaders in 1204 hundreds of relics were carried into the West as diplomatic gifts, memorabilia and tokens of victory. Yet many relics were also sent privately between male crusaders and their spouses and female kin. As recipients of relics women were often called upon to initiate new relic cults and practices of commemoration in honour of the men who sent these objects and who often never returned from the East. By considering the material quality of Fourth Crusade relics, this article argues that they were objects that exercised a profound effect on the lives of those receiving them, influencing their perceptions and actions, focusing practices of commemoration and ultimately shaping the memory of the crusade. Relics formed the scaffolding that recursively evoked a venerated martyr, a kinsman dead in the East, a family’s crusading lineage, and broader ideas of religious sacrifice.
The Appropriation and Weaponisation of the Crusades in the Modern Era (AAM version)
International Journal of Military History and Historiography. Special Issue: “The Appropriation and Weaponisation of the Crusades in the Modern Era”, guest editor, Jason T. Roche, Volume 41(2): 187-207, 2021
The introductory article proposes the hypothesis, which informed the decision making and editorial work in the Special Issue, that appropriations and weaponisations of the crusades in the modern era rely on culturally embedded master narratives of the past that are often thought to encompass public or cultural memories. Crucially, medievalism, communicated through metonyms, metaphors, symbols and motifs frequently acts as a placeholder instead of the master narratives themselves. The article addresses differences between medievalists' and modernists' conceptions of crusades, especially highlighting how the very meaning of words - such as crusade - differ in the respective fields. But the matter at hand goes beyond semantics, for the notion that the act of crusading is a live and potent issue is hard to ignore. There exists a complex and multifaceted crusading present. That people can appeal to master narratives of the crusades via mutable medievalism, which embodies zero-sum, Manichaean-type "clash of civilisations" scenarios, helps explain the continued appeal of the crusades to those who seek to weaponise them. It is hoped that the contributions to the special issue, introduced towards the end of the article, further a better understanding of the ways this has happened in the modern era.
Memory and History: Liturgical Time and Historical Time
History and Theory, 2002
This article investigates the differential structure and representation of time in memory and history. It examines two moments in Jewish historical thought-in the Middle Ages, and in works written within and after the Holocaust-and demonstrates the fundamentally liturgical nature of Jewish historical memory in selected texts from these two periods. Following the groundbreaking work of Yerushalmi, it seeks to demonstrate that for Jews, historical experience is incorporated into the cyclical reenactment of paradigmatic events in Jewish sacred ritual. Recent or contemporary experiences acquire meaning only insofar as they can be subsumed within Biblical categories of events and their interpretation bequeathed to the community through the medium of Scripture, that is to say, only insofar as they can be transfigured, ritually and liturgically, into repetitions and reenactments of ancient happening. In such liturgical commemoration, the past exists only by means of recitation; the fundamental goal of such recitation is to make it live again in the present, to fuse past and present, chanter and hearer, into a single collective entity. History, in the sense that we understand it to consist of unique events unfolding within irreversible linear time, is absorbed into cyclical, liturgical memory.
Historical Memory and Its (Dis)contents
Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, 2022
Efforts to recover and preserve the historical memory of past violence and injustice are today increasingly widespread in countries wrestling with, or emerging from, violent conflict. This reflects the rise of memory studies as a distinct field of inquiry as well as the growing recognition of the importance of centrally including the voices of victims in the elaboration of narratives of past suffering and evil. However, as an “essentially contested concept,” historical memory faces numerous challenges that have to be navigated when conducting applied historical memory work in violence-inflected settings. Among the pitfalls, historical memory work faces the unresolved tension between history and memory, which gives substance to claims that forgetting should trump remembering. Furthermore, owing to it being anchored in the subjective domain of memory, applied historical memory work risks deepening prevailing patterns of hatred, enmity and exclusion, in addition to being instrumentalis...
An interdisciplinary conference, 26 &27 May 2016 University of Amsterdam. The Holy Land has played an important role in the definition of the identities of the three major Abrahamic religions. Constitutive narratives about the past of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were largely bound to this shared and contested space. As put forward both by Maurice Halbwachs and Jan Assmann, memory adheres to what is ‘solid’, stored away in outward symbols. The Holy Land is a focal point around which the shared memories of these different groups formed, and has been crucial for defining their identities. Accordingly, the definition of this shared memory can be traced as a process of elaborating a cultural memory: an ‘artificial’ construction of developed traditions, transmissions and transferences. This process of construction was pursued through different media that cast the past into symbols. The period between the age of Constantine and the late Renaissance was formative for constructing this memory. It saw the valorization of Christian holy places under Constantine, the birth of Islam, the construction of an important Jewish scholarly community in the Holy Land, the Crusades, the massive growth of late medieval pilgrimage involving Jewish, Christian and Islamic groups, as well as other crucial events. The conference aims to bring together scholars who study the memories of the holy places within these religious galaxies from various disciplinary perspectives, in order to achieve a constructive exchange of ideas. This conference is organized by the team of the research project Cultural Memory and Identity in the Late Middle Ages: the Franciscans of Mount Zion in Jerusalem and the Representation of the Holy Land (1333-1516): Michele Campopiano, Valentina Covaci, Guy Geltner and Marianne Ritsema van Eck. The project is funded by the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO).