Liturgy and devotion in the crusader states: introduction

ABSTRACT

This special issue contains eight essays on the liturgy celebrated in the Latin East in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The papers as a whole demonstrate how the study of the liturgy can open up the religious and cultural history of the crusades and the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, reveal crusade spirituality and practice, and trace how the Latins of Outremer expressed through their liturgy their historical consciousness and awareness of contemporary realities.

KEYWORDS:

• Crusades
• first crusade
• Jerusalem
• liturgy
• pilgrimage
• devotion
• church of the holy sepulchre

Notes on contributors

Iris Shagrir is Associate Professor of Medieval History at the Open University of Israel, specialising in crusade history, and the religious and cultural history of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, pilgrimage, liturgy in the Latin East and medieval anthroponymy. Her publications include Naming Patterns in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Oxford: Unit for Prosopographical Research, Linacre College, 2003); The Crusades: History and Historiography (Raanana: The Open University of Israel, 2014); and edited volumes on the crusades and the Latin East. Her book The Parable of the Three Rings and the Idea of Religious Toleration in Premodern European Culture is forthcoming in 2017. For the period 2015–18 she is a member of the research group ‘Liturgy and Art as Constructors of Cultural Memory in the Middle Ages’ at the Mandel Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center in Humanities and Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Cecilia Gaposchkin is Associate Professor of History and Assistant Dean of Faculty for Pre-Major Advising at Dartmouth College. She is the author of The Making of Saint Louis: Kingship, Sanctity and Crusade in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008); Blessed Louis, Most Glorious of Kings: Texts Relating to the Cult of Saint Louis of France (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012); with Sean Field and Larry Field, The Sanctity of Louis IX: Early Lives of Saint Louis by Geoffrey of Beaulieu and William of Chartres (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014); and, most recently, Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017).

Notes

¹ Recent examples include Louis I. Hamilton, A Sacred City: Consecrating Churches and Reforming Society in Eleventh-Century Italy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); Margot Fassler, The Virgin of Chartres: Making History through Liturgy and the Arts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Helen Gittos and Sarah Hamilton, eds., Understanding Medieval Liturgy: Essays in Interpretation (Burlington: Ashgate, 2016); Eyal Poleg, Approaching the Bible in Medieval England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); John F. Romano, Liturgy and Society in Medieval Rome (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014); Susan Boynton, Shaping a Monastic Identity: Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000–1125 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Yitzhak Hen, ‘Key Themes in the Study of Early Medieval Liturgy’, in T&T Clark Companion to Liturgy, ed. Alcuin Reid (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 73–92; Yossi Maurey, Medieval Music, Legend, and the Cult of St Martin: the Local Foundations of a Universal Saint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

² Nathan Mitchell, ‘New Directions in Ritual Research’, in Foundations in Ritual Studies: a Reader for Students of Christian Worship, eds. Paul F. Bradshaw and John Allyn Melloh (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2007), 129.

³ Mostly because of the lack of manuscript evidence, we know extremely little about the liturgy of the Kingdom of Jerusalem outside Jerusalem itself.

⁴ Cristina Dondi, The Liturgy of the Canons Regular of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem: a Study and a Catalogue of the Manuscript Sources (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004).

⁵ Johannes Pahlitzsch, Graeci und Suriani im Palästina der Kreuzfahrerzeit. Beiträge und Quellen zur Geschichte des griechisch-orthodoxen Patriarchats von Jerusalem. Berliner Historische Studien 33 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2001); Christopher MacEvitt, Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

⁶ e.g. Iris Shagrir, ‘The Visitatio sepulchri at the Latin Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’, Al-Masaq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean 22 (2010): 57–77; eadem, ‘Adventus in Jerusalem: the Celebration of Palm Sunday in Twelfth-Century Jerusalem’, Journal of Medieval History 41 (2015): 1–21; M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017).

⁷ Anton Baumstark, On the Historical Development of the Liturgy, trans. Fritz West (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2011), German original from 1922; Michel Andrieu, ed., Le pontifical romain au moyen-âge, vol. 1, Le pontifical romain du XIIe siècle (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1938); idem, ed., Le pontifical romain au moyen-âge, vol. 2, Le pontifical de la curie romaine au XIIIe siècle (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1940); idem, ed., Le pontifical romain au moyen-âge, vol. 3, Le pontifical de Guillaume Durand (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1940); Stephen Joseph Peter Van Dijk and Joan Hazelden Walker, The Origins of the Modern Roman Liturgy: the Liturgy of the Papal Court and the Franciscan Order in the Thirteenth Century (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1960); Stephen Joseph Peter Van Dijk, Sources of the Modern Roman Liturgy: the Ordinals by Haymo of Faversham and Related Documents (1243–1307). Studia et documenta Franciscana 1–2 (Leiden: Brill, 1963); Cyrille Vogel and Reinhard Elze, eds., Le pontifical romano-germanique du dixième siècle. Studi e testi 226–7. 2 vols. (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1963); Cyrille Vogel, Medieval Liturgy: an Introduction to the Sources, trans. William G. Storey, Niels Krogh Rasmussen, O.P., and John K. Brooks-Leonard. NPM studies in church music and liturgy (Washington, D.C.: Pastoral Press, 1986); Aimé Georges Martimort and others, The Church at Prayer: an Introduction to the Liturgy. 4 vols. (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1985–8).

⁸ For review, see Giles Constable, ‘The Historiography of the Crusades’, in The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World, eds. Angeliki Laiou and Roy Parviz Mottahedeh (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2001); Christopher Tyerman, The Debate on the Crusades (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011); Iris Shagrir, The Crusades: History and Historiography (Raanana: The Open University of Israel, 2014), in Hebrew.

⁹ Bernard Hamilton, The Latin Church in the Crusader States: The Secular Church (London: Variorum, 1980).

¹⁰ See in addition to many articles, Amnon Linder, Raising Arms: Liturgy in the Struggle to Liberate Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages. Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003).

¹¹ The study of how people experienced the liturgy is now a thriving one. See for example Eric Palazzo, ‘Art, Liturgy and the Five Senses in the Early Middle Ages’, Viator 41 (2010): 25–56; Bissera Pentcheva, Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space, and Spirit in Byzantium (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017).

¹² John of Würzburg, ‘Peregrinatio’, in Peregrinationes Tres: Saewulf, John of Würzburg, Theodericus, ed. Robert Huygens. Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis 139 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1994), 139–40.

¹³ Dondi, Liturgy of the Canons Regular. Dondi's work follows the earlier investigation by Hugo Buchthal, Miniature Painting in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957).

Additional information

Funding

We thank the Israel Science Foundation for grants nos. 277/09 and 663/14, and the Mandel Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center in the Humanities and Jewish Studies. At Dartmouth College, we thank the Provost’s Office, the Leslie Center for the Humanities, and the Departments of History and Religion for the funds for the symposium that permitted the contributors to this volume to meet, and to read and discuss each other’s articles.