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Original Articles

Mirrored images: the Passion and the First Crusade in a fourteenth-century Parisian illuminated manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 352)

Pages 184-207 | Received 17 Mar 2014, Accepted 04 Aug 2014, Published online: 25 Mar 2015
 

Abstract

This lavish mid-fourteenth-century Parisian illuminated manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 352) combines a description of the Holy Land with an abridged version of the history and continuations of William of Tyre in Old French known as the Eracles. It is both visually familiar to scholars and under-studied. Several of its Gothic panel miniatures, especially folio 62r, the conquest of Jerusalem, have been published more than once, yet the manuscript's illumination programme as a whole has not been assessed since Jaroslav Folda's 1968 doctoral dissertation. Analysis of folio 62r in the context of both the full illumination programme and the manuscript's historical setting reveals that MS fr. 352 speaks to the desire of mid-fourteenth-century French nobility to see the chivalric present mirrored by the crusading past, the new Western ‘holy land’ of Paris mirrored by the true locus sanctus of Jerusalem, and the Passion mirrored by the First Crusade.

Acknowledgements

Dominique de Saint Etienne at Myrin Library, Ursinus College, worked patiently to order materials for me via interlibrary loan. M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, Norman Housley, Elizabeth Lapina, Richard Leson and Laura Whatley kindly read drafts of this article and I am especially grateful for their perceptive feedback, which has strengthened the article in numerous ways. I am equally grateful for the insight provided by this journal's anonymous reviewers. All errors are, of course, my own.

Notes

1 The following abbreviation is used in this paper: BnF: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France.

‘La tres noble et excellente Ystoire des saintes croniques d'outremer et des nobles chevaleries faites et commenchies par le preu, le vaillant et le saint homme Godefroi de Buillon’: BnF, MS fr. 352. The manuscript is listed as number 56 by Jaroslav Folda, ‘Manuscripts of the History of Outremer by William of Tyre: a Handlist’, Scriptorium 27 (1973): 90–5 (hereafter Folda, ‘Handlist’). The most recent and complete work on the manuscript (including a catalogue) remains Jaroslav Folda, ‘The Illustrations in Manuscripts of the History of Outremer by William of Tyre’. 2 vols. (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1968). See especially 1: 402–40 and 2: 251–60. Paulin Paris briefly discussed the manuscript in Les manuscrits françois de la Bibliothèque du Roi: leur histoire et celles des textes allemands, anglois, hollandois, italiens, espagnols de la même collection. 7 vols. (Paris: Techner, 1836‒48), 3: 5–9.

2 BnF, MS fr. 352, f. 62r. Published in Norman Housley, Fighting for the Cross: Crusading to the Holy Land (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), plate 11, and Susanna Throop, Crusading as an Act of Vengeance, 1095–1216 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2011), cover image; f. 49v is also relatively recognisable: for example, it was published in Michel Parisse, ‘Godefroy de Bouillon, le croisé exemplaire’, L'Histoire 47 (1982): 21.

3 Folda, ‘Illustrations in Manuscripts’, 1: 449. The dating is discussed further below.

4 Folda, ‘Handlist’.

5 For more on manuscript production in Paris in the fourteenth century, see Mary Rouse and Richard Rouse, Manuscripts and Their Makers: Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris, 1200–1500. 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2000). For more on reading Old French narrative manuscripts, see Keith Busby, Codex and Context: Reading Old French Verse Narrative in Context. 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2002). Earlier related studies of illuminated manuscripts include Jonathan J.G. Alexander, ‘Art History, Literary History, and the Study of Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts’, Studies in Iconography 18 (1997): 51–66; Jeffrey Hamburger, ‘The Visual and the Visionary: the Image in Late Medieval Monastic Devotions’, Viator 20 (1989): 161–82; Michael Camille, ‘Seeing and Reading: Some Visual Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy’, Art History 8 (1985): 26–49; Lesley Lawton, ‘The Illustration of Late Medieval Secular Texts, with Special Reference to Lydgate's “Troy Book”’, in Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1983), 41–69.

6 The manuscript's continuation ends with the conclusion of the Seventh Crusade in 1254 (Folda, ‘Illustrations in Manuscripts’, 2: 251), and thus is counted with those manuscripts with continuations that end before 1261 (Folda, ‘Handlist’, 94–5). The fact that the William of Tyre continuation in MS fr. 352 begins on f. 11r by referencing Eracles in text and rubric (Folda, ‘Illustrations in Manuscripts’, 2: 253) places it in the Eracles tradition. Peter Edbury is currently preparing a new edition of the Eracles; excerpts from the Eracles can be found at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/GuillaumeTyr4.asp (Accessed 2 March 2015). In the meantime, the Old French translation of William of Tyre's chronicle can be found in Paulin Paris, ed., Guillaume de Tyr et ses continuateurs (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1879).

7 For example, the manuscript is not addressed in Peter Edbury, ‘New Perspectives on the Old French Continuations of William of Tyre’, Crusades 10 (2010): 107–13; Peter Edbury, ‘The French Translation of William of Tyre's Historia: the Manuscript Tradition’, Crusades 7 (2007): 69–105; Bernard Hamilton, ‘The Old French translations of William of Tyre as an Historical Source’, in The Experience of Crusading 2: Defining the Crusader Kingdom, eds. Peter Edbury and Jonathan Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 93–112; John H. Pryor, ‘The Eracles and William of Tyre: an Interim Report’, in The Horns of Hattin, ed. Benjamin Z. Kedar (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1992), 270–93; Peter Edbury, ‘The Lyon Eracles and the Old French Continuations of William of Tyre’, in Montjoie: Studies in Crusade History in Honour of Hans Eberhard Mayer, eds. Benjamin Z. Kedar, Jonathan S.C. Riley-Smith and R. Hierstand (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 139–53; Margaret R. Morgan, The Chronicle of Ernoul and the Continuations of William of Tyre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). Professor Edbury has kindly informed me that because of the abbreviated nature of MS fr. 352's version of the Eracles, it will not be included in the new critical edition he is producing.

8 See n. 1 above. Since 1968, Folda has done substantial work on illuminated manuscripts of William of Tyre produced in the Levant: Crusader Manuscript Illumination at Saint-Jean d'Acre, 1275–91 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). More recently on these Levantine manuscripts, see Bianca Kühnel, ‘The Perception of History in Thirteenth-Century Crusader Art’, in France and the Holy Land: Frankish Culture at the End of the Crusades, eds. Daniel H. Weiss and Lisa Mahoney (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 161–86. Recent work on other Parisian William of Tyre manuscripts (excluding MS fr. 352) includes J. Folda, ‘Commemorating the Fall of Jerusalem: Remembering the First Crusade in Text, Liturgy, and Image’, in Remembering the Crusades: Myth, Image, and Identity, eds. Nicholas Paul and Suzanne Yeager (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 125–45, and Richard A. Leson, ‘Chivalry and Alterity: Saladin and the Remembrance of Crusade in a Walters Histoire d'Outremer’, Journal of the Walters Art Museum 68–9 (2010–11): 87–96.

9 BnF, MSS fr. 9083, 22495‒7, 24209; Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, MS W.142. For more details on the common characteristics of the group, see Folda, ‘Illustrations in Manuscripts’, 1: 403.

10 BnF, MS fr. 352, f. 1r. While other manuscripts in the ‘expanded cycle’ group do include miniatures related to Christ's life and death in the Holy Land in early folios, they situate those images firmly in a crusading context; three by leading with miniatures depicting Peter the Hermit (Walters Art Museum, MS W. 142; BnF, MSS fr. 22496–7, 24209), one by leading with a miniature of King Amalric alongside miniatures of Old and New Testament scenes (BnF, MS fr. 22495), and one by showing the First Crusaders besieging Jerusalem (BnF, MS fr. 9083). For details, see Folda, ‘Illustrations in Manuscripts’, 2: 140, 177, 202, 219.

11 BnF, MS fr. 352, ff. 47v, 48r, 48v, 49. Folda highlights this departure from the group programme in ‘Illustrations in Manuscripts’, 1: 422.

12 Folda notes this departure in ‘Illustrations in Manuscripts’, 1: 424.

13 BnF, MS fr. 352, ff. 1r, 49v, 62r.

14 MS fr. 352, f. 1r. The use of major introductory panel miniatures is a characteristic shared among the ‘expanded cycle’ group of manuscripts, though none of the others takes precisely the same approach as MS fr. 352; see n. 10 above.

15 The bird has one foot raised and appears to be poking or spearing the rear end of the monkey, whose legs are spread and who is holding a spherical object (a fruit or nut?) to its mouth. It is commonly known that a monkey or ape frequently represents the Devil; this dates back at least to the earliest Physiologus: Michael J. Curley, ed. and trans., Physiologus. 2nd edn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 38–9. The presence of the fruit or nut is reminiscent of one of Gilbert of Tournai's thirteenth-century crusade sermons, in which he exhorts his audience to be unlike the monkey, which ‘throws away the nut while it senses the outer bitterness in its skin, never perceiving the sweetness of its centre’: Gilbert of Tournai, ‘Sermo 1’, in Crusade Propaganda and Ideology. Model Sermons for the Preaching of the Cross, ed. Christoph T. Maier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 188. The kind of bird represented is unclear to my inexpert eyes; it is, perhaps, a heron or crane, and seems unlikely to be a pelican or phoenix (either of which would signify Christ). On the heron, the Physiologus cites Psalms 104:17 – ‘the heron is leader of their house’ – and notes the bird's prudence in having only one nest in which it eats, suggesting that this is like remaining in the ‘nest’ of the Church and eating only its food, i.e., avoiding heresy (40). Thus, perhaps this marginale represents the pursuit and injury of the Devil by the head of a godly family or lineage, and draws a parallel between this pursuit of the Devil and crusading. For more on bestiary images in the margins of later medieval manuscripts, see Debra Hassig, ‘Marginal Bestiaries’, in Animals and the Symbolic in Mediaeval Art and Literature, ed. L.A.J.R. Houwen (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1997), 171–88.

16 BnF, MS fr. 352, ff. 1r–10v.

17 ff. 2r, 2v, 4v, 5v, 6v, 10v.

18 f. 1v.

19 ff. 11r–174v.

20 f. 42v.

21 f. 46v.

22 f. 49v.

23 f. 61r.

24 f. 64v.

25 ff. 72r, 87r, 107v, 135v, 140r, 154v.

26 Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, MS W.142. Leson, ‘Chivalry and Alterity’, 87–96.

27 BnF, MS fr. 352, ff. 28r, 42v, 49v, 61r.

28 ff. 62r, 93r.

29 ff. 1r, 4v, 5v, 62r. The definitive work on demonising images of Jews and Muslims is Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

30 BnF, MS fr. 352, f. 1r.

31 ff. 1r, 62r.

32 Antioch, Jerusalem and Tyre; see ff. 42v, 61r, 62r, 93r.

33 Hugh the Great, Robert of Flanders, Robert of Normandy, Adhémar of Le Puy, Raymond of Toulouse, Raimbaud of Orange, Godfrey of Bouillon, Tancred of Sicily, Hugh of St Pol, Rotrou of Perch, Ysoard of Die.

34 Baldwin I, Baldwin II, Baldwin III, Amalric I, Baldwin IV, Guy of Lusignan.

35 Folda, ‘Illustrations in Manuscripts’, 1: 452–3.

36 Folda, ‘Illustrations in Manuscripts’, 1: 449.

37 Folda, ‘Illustrations in Manuscripts’, 1: 477.

38 Folda, ‘Illustrations in Manuscripts’, 1: 404.

39 See above and n. 10.

40 Folda, ‘Illustrations in Manuscripts’, 1: 428, 442, 446.

41 Norman Housley, The Later Crusades: From Lyons to Alcazar, 1274–1580 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 33–6; Christopher J. Tyerman, ‘Philip VI and the Recovery of the Holy Land’, English Historical Review 100 (1985): 25–52.

42 Tyerman, ‘Philip VI’, 26–7.

43 Maureen Quigley, ‘Romantic Geography and the Crusades: British Library Royal MS 19 D. 1’, Peregrinations 2, no. 3 (2009): 56–7. She includes BnF, MS fr. 22495 in this group.

44 Tyerman, ‘Philip VI’, 35; Marianne Sághy, ‘Crusade and Nationalism: Pierre Dubois, the Holy Land, and French Hegemony’, in The Crusades and the Military Orders: Expanding the Frontiers of Medieval Latin Christianity, eds. Zsolt Hunyadi and József Laszlovsky (Budapest: CEU Medievalia, 2001), 43–50.

45 Tyerman, ‘Philip VI’, 29–32. It used to be believed that the English commitment to crusade in the early fourteenth century was hesitant or superficial at best, but the opposite has been demonstrated by Timothy Guard in Chivalry, Kingship and Crusade: the English Experience in the Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013).

46 Folda, ‘Illustrations in Manuscripts’, 2: 251.

47 ‘Cest livre escrist uns museignor / Q'nest né com[te né mesiaulz] / En chastelet au haut estage / La sejourna plus de vii. ans / a grant pains et a grans tormens / sans meffait mes par volête / Ore soit le roi entalenté / De faire ent restitution / au clerc par boine entencion / Son estat en a. avillie / Et soucors du tout escilié / Pechie fera li rois pour voir / Sé vers lui n'en fait son devoir / Ses hoirs en son deshirites / [Sé il en est a tort retés] / Assévré l'ot de sa bouche / Mes raisons l'en donne reprouche’: Folda, ‘Illustrations in the Manuscripts’, 2: 260. There is also a transcript in Paris, Les manuscrits, 3: 8. My thanks to Frances Novack (Ursinus College), Elizaveta Strakhov (University of Pennsylvania), and Nicholas Paul (Fordham University) for their generous counsel and translation assistance on the colophon. Sadly, I have been unable to identify the ‘lord’ in the colophon.

48 BnF, MS fr. 24209, ff. 170r, 272r, 325r (Folda, ‘Illustrations in Manuscripts’, 2: 269, 273–4); Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, MS W. 142, ff. 315v, 320v, 326r (Folda, ‘Illustrations in Manuscripts’, 2: 152); BnF, MS fr. 9083, ff. 269r, 320v (Folda, ‘Illustrations in Manuscripts’, 2: 216–17); MS fr. 22495, ff. 153r, 241v, 287r, 294v (Folda, ‘Illustrations in Manuscripts’, 2: 189, 196, 200); MS fr. 22496, f. 104r, and MS fr. 22497, ff. 17v, 174v, 190r (Folda, ‘Illustrations in Manuscripts’, 2: 226, 232, 248–9).

49 That crusading was seen as an important component of Louis’ (and by extension, French royal) piety and kingship in the early fourteenth century has been demonstrated by M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, The Making of Saint Louis: Kingship, Sanctity, and Crusade in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 197–239, especially 236–8.

50 Housley, Later Crusades, 34.

51 It should be noted that when John agreed to crusade in 1363, he agreed to lead with Peter I of Lusignan, king of Cyprus, rather than monarchs of England and/or Navarre: Housley, Later Crusades, 40.

52 Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Romancing the Past: the Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

53 Folda, ‘Illustrations in Manuscripts’, 1: 452.

54 Elizabeth J. Moodey, ‘Historical Identity in the Burgundian Netherlands: the Role of Manuscripts’, in Tributes in Honor of James H. Marrow: Studies in Painting and Manuscript Illumination of the Late Middle Ages and Northern Renaissance, eds. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and A. S. Korteweg (London: Harvey Miller, 2006), 343–51.

55 Christopher Tyerman, ‘Philip VI’. For a discussion of Philip IV's ‘grante feste’ of 1313, an event heavily imbued with crusading overtones and involving many noble families, see Elizabeth A.R. Brown and Nancy F. Regalado, ‘La grant feste: Philip the Fair's Celebration of the Knighting of his Sons in Paris at Pentecost of 1313’, in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, eds. Barbara Hanawalt and Kathryn Reyerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 56–86. For a discussion of crusading traditions in French noble families in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, see Nicholas Paul, To Follow in Their Footsteps: the Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).

56 Michel Parisse, ‘Des Lorrains en croisade. La maison de Bar’, in Chemins d'outremer: études d'histoire sur la Méditerranée médiévale offertes à Michel Balard (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2004), 661–70.

57 E.A. Begin, Histoire des duchés de Lorraine et de Bar et des trois évêchés (Meurthe, Meuse, Moselle, Vosges) (1833; reprinted Geneva: Slatkine-Margariotis Reprints, 1975), 205. Citations refer to the Slatkine-Margariotis edition.

58 Members of the comital house participated in (and died on) the First, Second, Third, Fourth and Fifth Crusades, and were known as crusade leaders who traced their lineage back to Godfrey of Bouillon. See Parisse, ‘Des Lorrains en croisade’.

59 Georges Poull, La maison souveraine et ducale de Bar (Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1994), 257.

60 Poull, La maison souveraine, 290.

61 Poull, La maison souveraine, 286.

62 Poull, La maison souveraine, 260–2. On the administration of the county during Edward I's reign, see Hubert Collin, ‘Le comté de Bar au debut du XIVe siècle: étude de géographie administrative et économique’, Bulletin Philologique et Historique (1971): 81–93.

63 Poull, La maison souveraine, 265.

64 Poull, La maison souveraine, 262–4. Of course, this was after years of warfare between Bar and Lorraine; it is fair to say that over the long term, all of these relationships tipped from conflict to alliance, and vice versa.

65 Begin, Histoire des duchés, 195. She died just three years later. Edward's heir (Henry IV of Bar) and Rudolph of Lorraine came into conflict in 1337; the intervention of Philip VI in 1338 renewed the peace: Georges Poull, La maison ducale de Lorraine devenue la maison impériale et royale d'Autriche, de Hongrie et de Bohême (Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1991), 108.

66 See Housley, Later Crusades, 38–43.

67 BnF, MS fr. 352, ff. 47v, 48r, 48v, 49r.

68 Mark Cruse, ‘Costuming the Past: Heraldry in Illustrations of the “Roman d'Alexandre” (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264)’, Gesta 45 (2006): 45–8. As Cruse has noted, this use of arms within manuscripts is a powerful development dating from the late thirteenth century onwards (44). See also Leson, ‘Chivalry and Alterity’.

69 For more on the correlation between heraldry in tournaments and in illuminations, see Cruse, ‘Costuming the Past’, and Leson, ‘Chivalry and Alterity’.

70 This parallels the way that the text of the Eracles repeatedly highlights the participation of crusade leaders by name.

71 Cruse, ‘Costuming the Past’, 51–2.

72 Cruse, ‘Costuming the Past’, 52.

73 Cruse, ‘Costuming the Past’, 52. There is a clear correlation between the way this kind of imagery seems to have functioned and the way vernacular prose historiography itself functioned in thirteenth-century noble French society (Spiegel, Romancing the Past).

74 For two classic examples, see Baldric of Bourgueil, Historia Jerosolimitana. Recueil des Historiens des Croisades, Historiens Occidentaux 4 (Paris: Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 1879), 101–2, and William of Tyre, Chronicon, ed. R.B.C. Huygens. Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis 63. 2 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1986), 1: 410.

75 Most famously, the Meditationes vitae Christi: Meditations on the Life of Christ: an Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century, eds. Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961).

76 Sara Lipton, ‘“The Sweet Lean of His Head”: Writing about Looking at the Crucifix in the High Middle Ages’, Speculum 80 (2005): 1172–1208; Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Alasdair A. Macdonald, H.N. Bernhard Ridderbos and R.M. Schlusemann, eds., The Broken Body: Passion Devotion in Late-Medieval Culture (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1998); Ellen M. Ross, The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Richard Viladesau, The Beauty of the Cross: the Passion of Christ in Theology and the Arts, from the Catacombs to the Eve of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Robert Worth Frank, Jr., ‘Meditationes vitae Christi: the Logistics of Access to Divinity’, in Hermeneutics and Medieval Culture, eds. Patrick J. Gallacher and Helen Damico (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 39–50; Jeffrey Hamburger, ‘The Visual and the Visionary: the Image in Late Medieval Monastic Devotions’, Viator 20 (1989): 161–82; Cynthia Hahn, ‘Purification, Sacred Action, and the Vision of God: Viewing Medieval Narratives’, Word & Image 5 (1989): 71–84.

77 As Peter Lombard expressed it in the twelfth century, in the crucifixion ‘we are shown a sign of such love that we are moved and enflamed to the love of God, who did so much for us’: Peter Lombard, Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, bk. 4, dist. 19, cited by Viladesau, Beauty of the Cross, 91.

78 Ross, Grief of God, 24–5.

79 Ross, Grief of God, 45; R.N. Swanson, ‘Passion and Practice: the Social and Ecclesiastical Implications of Passion Devotion in the Late Middle Ages’, in The Broken Body, eds. Macdonald, Ridderbos and Schlusemann, 1–30. Swanson discusses a powerful image from Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, MS 1404, f. 37v (12–13). The image shows a man engaged in three stages of response to the crucifixion: carrying the cross (imitatio), suffering the stigmata (conformatio) and kissing Christ's feet (devotio).

80 Most recently, William Purkis, Crusading Spirituality in the Holy Land and Iberia, c.1095–c.1187 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008).

81 Jonathan Riley-Smith, ‘Crusading as an Act of Love’, History 65 (1980): 177–92; Susanna A. Throop, ‘Acts of Vengeance, Acts of Love: Crusading Violence in the Twelfth Century’, in War and Literature, eds. Laura Ashe and Ian Patterson. Essays & Studies 2014 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2014), 3–20.

82 Eudes of Châteauroux, ‘Sermo 1’, in Crusade Propaganda and Ideology, ed. Maier, 130–2.

83 Gilbert of Tournai, ‘Sermo 1’, in Crusade Propaganda and Ideology, ed. Maier, 184–6.

84 There is extensive scholarship on this point. An accessible synthesis of key points can be found in Jeremy Cohen, Christ Killers: the Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). A recent discussion of the link between changing representations of Christ and attitudes towards Jews is Janez Premk, ‘The New Iconography of Christ and the Changes in Depictions of the Jews in High and Late Middle Ages’, Ikon 1 (2008): 157–68.

85 The development of Passion plays with strong anti-Jewish overtones is well known; I also refer to legendary accounts of the conquest of Jerusalem by Titus and Vespasian: see Alvin E. Ford, ed., La vengeance de Nostre-Seigneur: the Old and Middle French Prose Versions. 2 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984–93); Stephen K. Wright, The Vengeance of Our Lord: Medieval Dramatizations of the Destruction of Jerusalem (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989). For a broader study of overall trends, see Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: the Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

86 See Throop, Crusading as an Act of Vengeance, passim but especially 97–114, 135–9.

87 To give just one example, several accounts and letters from the early fourteenth century discussing the imaginary Mongol conquest of Jerusalem either ascribe a desire for vengeance to God, to Khān Ghazan, or to both. Sylvia Schein, ‘Gesta Dei per Mongolos 1300: the Genesis of a Non-Event’, English Historical Review 94 (1979): 806, 816, 819.

88 Similar correlations between the crucifixion, crusading to Jerusalem and anti-Jewish sentiment can be seen in twelfth-century visual evidence, too. For example, see Naomi R. Kline, ‘The Typological Window of Orbais-l'Abbaye: the Context of its Iconography’, Studies in Iconography 14 (1995): 83–130.

89 ‘A vengier le tort et la honte que li Mescréant fesoient à Nostre Seigneur et à son pueple en sa terre de Jherusalem’: Paris, ed., Guillaume de Tyr et ses continuateurs, 30 (bk. 1, ch. 16). Nothing similar to this sentence is present in this section of the Latin chronicle of William of Tyre; see William of Tyre, Chronicon, 1: 136. In contrast, William of Tyre explicitly describes Pope Eugenius III's call for the Second Crusade in terms of vengeance; see William of Tyre, Chronicon, 2: 739–40.

90 ‘ … que tuit cil qui à ce pelerinage se lioient, mettoient le signe de la croiz sur la destre espaule, por l'enneur de celui qui le torment de la croiz porta à ses espaules por nous sauver; et accomplissoient ce que Jhesucrist dist en l'Evangile: Qui vent venir après moi, renie noi meismes, et preigne la crois et me suive’: Paris, ed., Guillaume de Tyr et ses continuateurs, 31 (bk. 1, ch. 16). Cf. the Latin chronicle: ‘Convenerat autem apud omnes, et idipsum de mandato domini pape iniunctum fuerat, ut quotquot predicte vie voto se obligarent, vivifice crucis salutare signum vestibus imprimerent et in humeris illius sibi portarent memoriam, cuius passionis locum visitare proposuerant, illum imitantes, cui ad nostrum redemptionem properanti factus est … et illud domini mandatum iuxta litteram plane videbatur impleri: qui vult venire post me, abneget semet ipsum et tollat crucem suam et sequatur me’ (William of Tyre, Chronicon, 1: 137–8).

91 ‘ … desirriers de vengier la honte Jhesu-Crist’: Paris, ed., Guillaume de Tyr et ses continuateurs, 279 (bk. 8, ch. 11). References to vengeance are not present in the parallel passage in the Latin chronicle: ‘ … populus tamen cum omni devotione votum prosequens, ira succensus qualem sacrilegii dolor poterat ministrare, ad predictam pervenit ecclesiam’ (William of Tyre, Chronicon, 1: 401).

92 ‘Ce fut le jor d'un vendredi, entor none. Bien est créable chose que Nostre Sires le fist par grant senefiance: car à ce jor, entor cele eure, soufri-il mort en ce leu por les pecheurs raembre. A ce jor meismes fu fez li premerains homs; pour ce vout-il, li haus Sires, que li pueples de ses pelerins leaus à tel jor li rendist sa ville et delivrast, à son servise fere, et rendist la franchise aus crestiens qui longuement i avoient esté en dolereus servage’: Paris, ed., Guillaume de Tyr et ses continuateurs, 289 (bk. 8, ch. 18). Cf. the Latin chronicle: ‘Erat autem feria sexta et hora nona, videturque procuratum divinitus, ut qua die et qua hora pro mundi salute in eadem urbe passus est dominus, eadem et pro Salvatoris gloria fidelis decertans populus desiderii sui felicem impetraret consummationem: eadem enim die et primus homo conditus et secundus pro primi salute morti traditus esse legitur, unde et decuit ut eius membra et imitatores in ipsius nomine de hostibus eiusdem triumpharent’ (William of Tyre, Chronicon, 1: 410).

93 Folda, ‘Illustrations in Manuscripts’, 1: 424.

94 Harvey Stahl, Picturing Kingship: History and Painting in the Psalter of Saint Louis (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2008), 83–9.

95 Quigley, ‘Romantic Geography’, 54–5.

96 Quigley, ‘Romantic Geography’, 76.

97 Daniel H. Weiss, Art and Crusade in the Age of Saint Louis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 29, 56–65.

98 Weiss, Art and Crusade, 18. For more on the visual programme of the upper chapel, see Alyce A. Jordan, Visualizing Kingship in the Windows of the Sainte-Chapelle (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002). Jordan argues that many of the formal characteristics of the programme of stained glass imitate the formal characteristics found in contemporary textual narratives.

99 Weiss, Art and Crusade, 30.

100 Meredith Cohen, ‘An Indulgence for the Visitor: the Public at the Sainte-Chapelle of Paris’, Speculum 83 (2008): 840–83.

101 Weiss, Art and Crusade, 11.

102 Joseph R. Strayer, ‘France: the Holy Land, the Chosen People, and the Most Christian King’, in idem, Medieval Statecraft and the Perspectives of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 302. More recently, see Gaposchkin, Making of Saint Louis, passim, but especially 72–7.

103 Cited by Weiss, Art and Crusade, 11.

104 Cohen, ‘Indulgence for the Visitor’, 844.

105 Cohen, ‘Indulgence for the Visitor’, 847.

106 Instead, the glass programme presents ‘sacred history in images rich in narrative detail with a decided emphasis on holy war and kingship’ (Weiss, Art and Crusade, 47).

107 Richard Krautheimer has argued that medieval viewers understood buildings to be copies of each other in terms other than perfect physical mimicry; instead, what mattered were ‘the content and the significance of the building’: ‘Introduction to an “Iconography of Medieval Architecture”’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942): 20.

108 Despite the obvious role played by Sainte-Chapelle in the ideology of later medieval French kingship, the illumination may reflect French architecture more broadly as well as Paris specifically. As Weiss demonstrates, in its structural design Saint-Chapelle echoed examples from Europe and France in particular, incorporating ‘architectural ideas with strong associations both to the church and to the Capetian dynasty’ (Art and Crusade, 29).

109 There is a helpful and brief discussion of memoria in Nicholas Paul and Suzanne Yeager, ‘Introduction: Crusading and the Work of Memory, Past and Present’, in Remembering the Crusades, eds. Paul and Yeager, 7–11. The classic work is Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: a Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

110 Similar points are made in Housley, Later Crusades, 393, 395–403.

111 Housley, Later Crusades, 401.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the American Historical Association under a Bernadotte E. Schmitt Grant (2012) and Ursinus College under a Faculty Development Grant (2012).

Susanna A. Throop received a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge and is Associate Professor of History at Ursinus College. She has authored Crusading as an Act of Vengeance, 1095–1216 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011) and co-edited Vengeance in the Middle Ages: Emotion, Religion and Feud (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) and The Crusades and Visual Culture (Ashgate, forthcoming). She is now examining the role of the crucifixion in twelfth-century crusading culture.

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