introduction: material religion in the crusading world

Abstract

This short essay introduces Material Religion in the Crusading World, a special issue that brings together a group of scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds working on aspects of Latin Christian material religion between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. The particular focus of the special issue is on the materiality of devotion across the “crusading world”—a space that is broadly defined as those parts of medieval Europe and the Near East that were in some way affected by the experience of transcultural religious violence, whether directly, such as in Christendom’s frontier regions in the Holy Land and the Iberian Peninsula, or indirectly, such as the heartlands of Latin Christianity in England, France, Germany and Italy. Taken together, the papers within the special issue explore the medieval crusading movement as material religion, with a particular focus on bodies, things, and spaces.

Keywords:

• crusades
• devotion
• religious material culture
• Jerusalem
• Holy Land, materiality
• Middle Ages

Acknowledgments

The papers collected in this special issue emerged from a workshop on “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Medieval Material Religion” that was held at the Museum of the Order of St. John on 21–22 June 2016, as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellows project “Bearers of the Cross: Material Religion in the Crusading World, 1095–c.1300”. The editors are grateful to all those who attended and contributed to the workshop, as well as to our colleagues at the museum for providing such a congenial environment for our discussions.

Additional information

Funding

We thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council, whose generous funding made the workshop possible under grant number AH/M010678/1.

Notes on contributors

William J. Purkis

William Purkis is Reader in Medieval History at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is the author of Crusading Spirituality in the Holy Land and Iberia, c.1095–c.1187 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2008) and co-editor (with Matthew Gabriele) of The Charlemagne Legend in Medieval Latin Texts (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2016). He has also published various journal articles and book chapters on aspects of the history of crusading, pilgrimage, and monasticism in the central Middle Ages. From 2015–2017 he was the Principal Investigator on the AHRC Leadership Fellows project “Bearers of the Cross: Material Religion in the Crusading World, 1095–c.1300” (http://www.bearersofthecross.org.uk), and in 2017 was the co-curator (with Abigail Cornick) of the Holy City, Holy War: Devotion to the Sacred in Crusader Jerusalem exhibition at the Museum of the Order of St. John, London. He is currently completing a book on the devotional ideas and practices of crusaders and other Latin Christians associated with the crusading movement, to be published by Yale University [email protected]