Download PDF | (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature) Suzanne M. Yeager - Jerusalem medieval narrative-Cambridge University Press (2008).
270 Pages
JERUSALEM IN MEDIEVAL NARRATIVE
During the early medieval period, crusading brought about new ways of writing about the city of Jerusalem in Europe. By creating texts that embellished the historical relationship between the Holy City and England, English authors endowed their nation with a reputation of power and importance. In Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative, Suzanne Yeager identifies the growth of medieval propaganda aimed at rousing interest in crusading, and analyzes how fourteenth-century writers refashioned their sources to create a substantive (if fictive) English role in the fight for Jerusalem. Centering on medieval identity, this study offers new assessments of some of the fourteenth century’s most popular works, including English pilgrim itineraries, political treatises, the romances Richard, Coer de Lyon and The Siege of Jerusalem, and the prose Book of Sir John Mandeville. This study will be an essential resource for the study of medieval literary history, travel, crusade, and the depiction of Jerusalem in medieval literature.
SUZANNE M. YEAGER is Assistant Professor of English at Fordham University.
Acknowledgments
In writing this book, I am grateful for the considerable support from many people. I would like to thank Suzanne Conklin Akbari, who supplied generous expertise and nurtured this project in its formative stages, and who continued to offer helpful insights as the book came to fruition. I am also grateful to George Rigg for his contributions to the Latin translations and his suggestions regarding the many texts in this project. I thank David Klausner for his wise guidance and support. Likewise, I wish to thank Joe Goering for sharing his knowledge of crusading history. I owe a debt of gratitude to Anne Hudson and Vincent Gillespie for fostering my early interest in texts of popular medieval devotion. For their editorial support of this book, I am grateful to Linda Bree, Maartje Scheltens, Joanna Breeze, and Clare Orchard of Cambridge University Press; while for their timely and helpful response to the version initially submitted, I want to thank the two anonymous readers from the Cambridge University Press.
Among others who contributed invaluably, I am grateful to Alastair Minnis who has been an endless source of encouragement. Kathryn A. Smith offered generous advice regarding visual images of Jerusalem, and I am indebted to her, as well as to Danielle Joyner and Nina Rowe for their suggestions. I am grateful to Susan Crane and Judith Weiss for their valuable insights on medieval romance. I also thank Ralph Hanna III, David Lawton, and Craig Taylor for offering historical perspectives. For sharing their experience and advice, I would also like to thank Mary Erler, Katie Little, Andy Orchard, and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne.
I also thank Andy Galloway, Tom Hill, and Paul Hyams for their suggestions and guidance. I owe particular thanks to Maryanne Kowaleski not only for her support of my project, but also for her invitation to present a selection from it at the Fordham University Center for Medieval Studies Lecture Series; special thanks are due to her, Richard Gyug, and Nicholas Paul for their insights. I also thank the Department of English at Fordham University for awarding useful course reductions during the completion of this project. Selections from various parts of this work have been presented at several conferences including the International Congress on Medieval Studies in 2004-2007, the International Medieval Congress in 2007, and the Medieval Academy Conference in 2005. For these opportunities I would like to thank the organizers and audiences for their feedback, especially Dee Dyas, Susan Signe-Morrison, and Tamara O’Callaghan.
Thanks are due to the library staff at the Columbia University Butler Library; the Cornell Olin Library and the Cornell University Rare Books Room; the Fordham University Walsh and Quinn Libraries; the Oxford University Bodleian Library; the University of Toronto Robarts Library, and particularly to Caroline Suma of the University of Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies Library. To Penny Hatfied, Eton College Archivist, I owe a special debt of gratitude for her assistance with the manuscripts related to William Wey. I am also grateful for the friendship and advice of Tuija Ainonen, Gabriella Corona, Johanna Kramer, Karen Sawyer Marsalek, Katherine Terrell, and M. E. Yeager.
I am particularly indebted to my parents for teaching me the value of hard work and the delights of intellectual curiosity. I dedicate this book to them in thanks for their continued inspiration. I would especially like to thank my husband, Ieuan Williams, for his reading of drafts, and offering encouragement and loving companionship, in via. All of these people have enriched this book; any remaining errors are my own.
Introduction: texts and contexts
Jerusalem has been represented for more than two millennia as a recurrent object of travelers’ desire. Viewed as the cradle of three faiths — Christianity, Islam, and Judaism — the city serves simultaneously as the home of the Holy Sepulchre, the Dome of the Rock, and place of the Temple. In all cases the sacred city held and, for some, continues to hold value as the locus of scriptural and devotional imagination for the People of the Book. This study explores texts made by English medieval Christian writers who characterized the holy city in a multiplicity of ways. By the fourteenth century, English authors had, readily available to them, fully developed symbolic terms with which to describe Jerusalem.
This terminology, enriched for over a millennium by figures such as Augustine, John Cassian, Gregory the Great, Bede, and many others, contributed to the theological refinement of the city’s many senses. Likewise, in the hands of English, fourteenth-century writers, the holy city was like a palimpsest ready for inscription. Drawing from a rich inheritance of symbolic interpretation, these authors represented Jerusalem as many things, including the image of heaven, the Christian soul, the home of firstcentury Hebrews, the Christian Church, the cloister, crusader holding, object of competition, peace among Christians, scriptural mnemonic, and symbol of one’s homeland.
In identifying England with the Holy Land, the aforementioned “Walsingham Ballad,” widely known to fifteenth-century English pilgrims, illustrates one of the interpretations of place important to Christian devotion considered in this book. English writers were not alone in identifying their country with the Holy Land; indeed, contemporary French authors maintained a tradition that associated their own audiences with that region from the time of Charlemagne. Similar tropes appear in later English medieval writing: in the works studied here, England’s relationship with Jerusalem was crucial to perceptions of English political authority and religious morality.
The following chapters assess medieval narratives that illustrate English medieval desire for this site of devotion. The nine texts whose associations with the holy city are discussed here circulated in fourteenth- through early sixteenth-century England. These selected pilgrim guidebooks, romances, prose narratives, devotional poems, and items of political correspondence were among the most popular works of their day; in addition, some less well-known pieces included here held great influence over public policy makers. By examining all of these texts, it becomes clear that Jerusalem-inspired crusade rhetoric was disseminated broadly in late medieval England, and that this discourse worked to define the Christian audience there as sacred and politically authoritative.
In each case, these narratives borrow the tropes of crusading to create an expression of the militant zeal with which Jerusalem must be won. As this study shows, English ideals of communal identity were shaped by this rhetoric that would define England as a most holy nation, foremost among its European peers. The language originally developed to promote crusade was deployed by later English writers to describe conflicts between England and France, justifying the English position in the Papal Schism and sanctioning the violence of the Hundred Years War. In the uses of crusade rhetoric and Jerusalem’s image recast, we see how religious desire and political discourse are brought together in the context of the sacred.
IMAGINING JERUSALEM IN FOURTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND
European Christian perceptions of Jerusalem’s numinous qualities heightened the competition for this religious resource, for the city was perceived by many as a relic in its own right. The basis of this belief stems from medieval theology which stipulated that everyday objects, such as cloth and soil, became imbued with divine power once they had touched the original remains of a sacred body. These “contact relics” could include pieces of tombs, oil from funerary lamps, and the dust in and near burial sites.” While Jerusalem itself did not constitute the physical remains of a certain saint or Christ, it was perceived to derive its holiness from the biblical figures who had inhabited it, and through its role in the Passion. For instance, one anonymous medieval visitor wrote that the pit where Helena discovered the true cross received the same reverence as that accorded to pieces of the original.’ Dust from the tomb of the Holy Sepulchre enjoyed particular popularity as a relic and souvenir ever since Augustine had observed that miracles were worked by it.* Also desirable were flasks of oil said to be exuded from surfaces at the sacred sites.’ Some travelers chipped away stone from important monuments, necessitating the shrines’ physical protection by human guards or sturdy coverings.° Pilgrims also were known to take exact measurements of the Tomb of the Holy Sepulchre in order to aid their memories and devotions regarding their pilgrimage. Some visitors created their own contact relics: devotees placed boards on the holy sites, cut these planks to the exact size of the object they revered, and brought the copy home with them.’ As I find in this study, some pilgrim narratives were regarded as contact relics of a special kind.
Jerusalem was prized by many Christians as a witness of biblical history, providing concrete evidence of Christ’s existence, devotional contact with Christ himself, and an interactive landscape in which to earn spiritual rewards. Because Christ had chosen that place as his earthly home, it was considered blessed by God and the prophets.” Eschatologically, the Bible predicted that the Last Judgment would take place near there. As mentioned earlier, the city also served as an exegetical representation of the human soul, for, just as Jerusalem had suffered at the hands of its many historical invaders, the Christian soul was perceived as constantly threatened by the wiles of the devil. The city was also viewed as the reflection of the “real,” holy, and celestial one.’ It was this Celestial Jerusalem that all medieval Christians sought; thus every Christian, whether or not he or she visited the earthly city, could imagine his or her life on earth as a pilgrimage.’° Because of the enormous reliquary value placed on the terrestrial city, many other pilgrimages were of spiritual value only in so far as they were considered an imitation of the journey to Jerusalem. It is true that certain shrines boasted their own particular attractions, such as cures for blindness from the statue of St. Foy at Fécamp, the healing of skin diseases from the waters at Canterbury, or penance fulfilled in Rome. Jerusalem, however, because of its Christological, exegetical, historical, and eschatological significance, was thought to exceed all other pilgrimages in spiritual rewards."
Because of its associations with the life of Christ, Jerusalem came to be used as a mnemonic device recalling biblical events for those reading or hearing about its description, or actually visiting the sites. Some hoped to follow Christ’s footsteps, and so enact a form of compassion with their God. For the devotional exercise of meditation on the life of Christ, this land was ideal for its identifiable landmarks which could, in turn, facilitate memory and devotion. Deploying the ars memoriae, visitors could feel they inhabited the events of scripture as they progressed through the Holy Land. This process of remembrance was related to Christian ecclesiastical ideas about memory function as discussed by Augustine in his Confessiones. This work categorizes the process of remembering abstractions, such as events and ideas, in relation to physical places, such as “fields” and “spacious palaces” [campos / lata praetoria], allowing for their easier recall."* In the mind, objects of memory were to be stored in “certain rather secret receptacles” for later use, when they could be extracted from a “treasury of memory” [in abstrusioribus quibusdam receptaculis / ex ... thesauro memoriae].'’ Just as memories could be assigned to specific locations such as castles and fields, Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski have shown that biblical structures also were used as storehouses of memory, and that these places served as reminders of scriptural events.'* Records of pilgrim experience tell us that from at least the fourth century, Jerusalem’s visitors received instruction in these memory techniques from their guides who associated abstract scriptural narratives with physical sites. Travelers’ texts illustrate that such associations between location and biblical event were handed down with few changes, over time. The standardization of the Jerusalem tour offered the possibility of sharing and regulating the interpretation of the place to the extent that, by the fourteenth century, the practice of imagining the holy city had been codified by the texts which surrounded it. From a later medieval standpoint, the terrestrial city of Jerusalem, along with the maps, literature, and diagrams connected with it, was viewed by western Christians as a concrete representation of their faith, authority, and power. Access to the real, existing structures allowed Christian visitors to share objects in common not only for enabling devotion, but also for systematizing a means of public, communal memory.
ENGLISH PILGRIMS AND THE NEGOTIATIONS OF JERUSALEM TRAVEL
In this study, the works by pilgrims Richard Torkington, William Wey, and an anonymous fourteenth-century author offer a picture of what challenges and rewards the journey involved. The guidebooks they produced, the early sixteenth-century Diarie of Englysshe Travell, the mid-fifteenth-century Jtineraries, and the fourteenth-century /tinerarium cuiusdam Anglici, 1344-45, respectively, illustrate how readily English writers adopted portions of pre-existing accounts into their narratives, accepting other pilgrims as authorities on various holy sites, sometimes without corroborating the evidence themselves. That this textual community included a broad spectrum of European authors is seen in the cross-pollination of itineraries originating from England and the Continent, and also from Jerusalem, where, beginning in the fourteenth century, a standard written source may have been circulated in many languages by the Franciscan friars. Likewise, portrayals of the Islamic presence in Jerusalem were passed down in relatively unchanged form, perpetuating an overtly negative Christian view of Islam. The Islamic groups, universally referred to as “Saracens” in these texts, are depicted as threatening to Christian safety and as adversaries against whom to unify.” In fact, the very danger that Muslim peoples represented enabled a specific kind of Christian devotion. These interpretations of Jerusalem and its inhabitants, available to many European medieval audiences by means of guidebooks and other forms, show the influence of crusading ideologies on late medieval writing about the holy city. In recording the challenges that they faced on the road, pilgrims identified themselves with martyrs who had suffered on behalf of their associations with the city, including crusaders, saints, other pilgrims, and Christ himself.
Although the pilgrimage was at once expensive and physically difficult for English travelers — costing an estimated year’s wages and lasting several months — many made the journey. Indeed, the English were known as such avid travelers that English medieval writers, inspired by natural philosophers, sought to explain this predilection through scientific means: John Gower, in his fourteenth-century discussion of the elements and their relation to humanity, reasons that the English are wont to travel because they are governed by the moon. He explains that, unlike the French who are ruled by Mercury and therefore lazy and slow to travel, the English are predisposed to wander:
John Mandeville, too, writes that English people are destined to roam because of the influence of the moon on the seventh climate, which they inhabit:
And in oure contrey is alle the contrarie, for wee ben in the seuenthe clymat that is of the mone, and the mone is of lyghtly mevynge and the mone is planete of weye. And for that skylle is yeueth vs wille of kynde for to meve lyghtly and for to go dyuerse weyes and to sechen strange thinges and other dyuersitees of the world, for the mone envyrouneth the erthe more hastyly than ony other planete.’”
Likewise, chronicler Ranulf Higden attributed the natural curiosity of the English to their penchant for travel."* Even writers in the later medieval period note — albeit some with less enthusiasm than their predecessors — the English desire to go on pilgrimage.
ENGLISH CRUSADING IDENTITIES: ORIGINS AND CONTEXTS
Pilgrims and crusaders alike recognized Jerusalem’s importance; in fact, medieval crusading developed, at least discursively, as a form of itinerant devotion. Almost two hundred years after King Richard I of England deployed his armies in the Middle East, English romance writers referred to his crusade as a “visit to the Lord’s Sepulchre,” and to Richard as “Goddes owne pilgrim.” In present-day terms, the real nature of the campaign appears cloaked in euphemism which substitutes the actions of the bellicose soldier with that of a peaceful pilgrim. However, the conflation of pilgrimage and crusade in medieval practice is not new, and many historians have explored how these seemingly opposing elements often fit together. Hans Eberhard Mayer writes that during the Middle Ages, crusade, known as expeditio, iter in terram sanctam, or peregrinatio, was another type of pilgrimage; only in this case, the pilgrims bore arms.” No Latin word for “crusade” entered into use in England or the Continent until the mid-thirteenth century; until then, approximations such as passagium, passagium generale, and expeditio crucis were used.”° Indeed, it appears that the English word crusade in its current usage appeared as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.*' Linguistically, the phenomenon of crusade as distinct from pilgrimage never really existed in the medieval period.** Other likenesses related the two activities; for instance, pilgrims and crusaders both wore similarly distinctive clothing, for the former carried the characteristic scrip and staff while the latter wore the sign of the cross. Also, both groups were distinguished from other travelers by an official liturgical rite. On a legal basis, James Brundage has shown that in the eyes of twelfth-century canonists, crusaders were, for the most part, indistinct from pilgrims, since both enjoyed similar rights and privileges.*’ Nevertheless, substantial dissimilarities existed — most importantly, crusaders were awarded differential indulgences and were expected to bear arms.** The focus of this study is not to locate further contrasts between medieval pilgrimage and crusade, but rather to recognize and explore medieval portrayals of militant crusade as they were inflected by devotion, and to note how, in turn, the rhetoric of crusading came to influence latemedieval English writing about Jerusalem.
In the texts discussed here, depictions of the Holy Land adhere to a descriptive mode established around the time of the First Crusade. The several chronicle sources representing Pope Urban I’s sermon at Clermont render Jerusalem as heaven on earth, a literal dwelling place for humanity, a sacred object for adoration, and the rightful possession of western Christendom. This portrayal was designed to compel crusading recruitment, and lasted well into the thirteenth century. There is no authoritative account of the pope’s sermon of 1095, but there were many chroniclers who wrote of the event, claiming a place as eye-witness, or that they had heard about it from a reliable source. Marcus Bull has outlined the cautions involved with using these reports as accurate accounts of Urban’s speech, but also has identified useful patterns among the versions of the sermon, suggesting a dual emphasis on “the circumstances in which the Holy Land, and especially Jerusalem, found itself,” and on “the actions and characteristics of the Muslims there.”*’ These two topics were woven into subsequent European crusading sermons regarding the Holy Land in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.*° In the fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury narratives discussed in this study, this binary continues to influence pilgrim writing, romance, prose works, devotional poetry, and political missives; indeed, these two negotiating points appear repeatedly in the texts mentioned here, to the extent that I propose that they offer a means with which Christian communities defined themselves collectively and individually, by representing their resistance to Islam, and support for Jerusalem.
This militant language, reliant as it was on religious devotion toward the holy city, constitutes part of what I call crusade rhetoric in this study.
These tropes associated with crusading were shaped by early perceptions of divine right. According to the reports of Urban’s rationale, because “Deus hoc vult” [God wills it], the Christian armies who pursued the campaign would find immediate success. As Penny Cole has demonstrated, these sentiments about Jerusalem such as those attributed to Urban had been long in the making.*” Likewise, after Clermont, crusade rhetoric continued to adapt itself to the subsequent fortunes of the campaigns. Following the First Crusade and its successes confirming European beliefs about Christian potency, the Second and Third Crusades brought failure not only in the surrender of Jerusalem, but also through substantial loss of life, territory, and other valued relics. These poor results brought many to ask how these events could align with what had been perceived as God’s will. As Cole and others have shown, one of many ecclesiastical responses involved the development of penance-inflected crusade rhetoric, attributing collapses in power to the Christians’ immoral behavior.» This attempt to assimilate military downfall into a divine plan is especially evident in those sermons that took place after the Fall of Acre, the last Crusader State, in 1291, marking the end of Christian occupation of the mainland. Such discourse subsequently influenced the Jerusalem-related narratives of England, particularly in the ways that authors situated their audiences around crusade, described the city and its inhabitants, and came to promote certain forms of morality.
In addition to the crusade rhetoric that focuses on moral attitudes toward the holy city, other discourses in this vein illustrate ideals of militant behavior, as seen in the language of conquest and chivalry employed in the medieval crusade chronicles and romances. For example, this rhetoric includes chivalric tropes to describe devastation, such as images of cloven bodies and rivers of blood. Suspension of disbelief regarding bellicose feats, such as the knight who single-handedly slaughters one thousand men, are also typical features. Likewise, the term includes military appeals with spiritual undertones, such as exhortations urging Christians to liberate the land of their “heritage,” to take back what is “rightfully” theirs.*? As I hope to show, such rhetoric of crusade comes to describe acts of brutality against non-Christians in a way that, as Cole suggests, can “be thought of as both necessary and laudatory on grounds which were purely religious.”*° These concepts of liberation and religious purgation of Jerusalem were present from the early crusade accounts onwards and continued to have vitality in the fourteenth century. As I show in this study, this range of crusade rhetoric would later be deployed in the literature of the Hundred Years War to articulate an English communal identity distinguishable from that of their French neighbors.
A study of English communal identity and the literatures of the Hundred Years War necessarily involves discussion of national identity. The term “nation” and its applicability to the Middle Ages is often debated; some scholars such as Perry Anderson and Anthony Giddens restrict use of the term to post-eighteenth-century culture, viewing the French Revolution as the benchmark of the rise of the modern state — the event on which some present definitions of “nation” depend. Other scholars have looked to pre-Enlightenment structures of communal affiliation that also support modern ideas of nation; in this way, evidence of nationhood is seen in those things a community shares in common, including its perception of its past, shared geographical territory, language, codified social organization, and bureaucratic structures such as taxes and laws. Likewise, some theorists who apply the terminology of nation to medieval England localize this application in discourses of Self and Other. Kathy Lavezzo provides a good example:
The bundle of attributes that the members of a nation are imagined to share are far from stable, but instead can range from the diachronic (territory) to the synchronic (history), from the biological (race) to the cultural (religion, language, etc.) and to the political (the state). Coterminous with the various fantasies of sameness, union and wholeness that nationalism entails are fantasies of difference, the construction of others whom the nation is “not” and whom the nation surmounts ... [MJaking medieval “England” also depended on the appropriation of strangers both within (women, the poor, merchants) and without (Ireland, France, Italy) its boundaries, even as it excluded those same others.”
In addition to Lavezzo, fruitful studies by Marc Bloch, Susan Crane, John Gillingham, Geraldine Heng, Diane Speed, Lynn Staley, Thorlac Turville-Petre, and many others have demonstrated that a discourse of nation and nationhood existed in medieval England. Such work has provided an important basis upon which this book is written. However, the intention of my study is not to expand or affirm the terminology related to nationhood, but rather to discuss English communal identities shaped by religious and political writing about Jerusalem.
THE HOLY CITY AS GUARANTOR OF SACRAL IDENTITY: THE JERUSALEM RELATION
The texts discussed here present physical and spiritual connections to Jerusalem as supremely valuable for a variety of reasons. This association, which I call the Jerusalem relation, was made by means of armed or unarmed pilgrimage to the holy city, performed in actuality or in the mind. As I discuss, a Jerusalem relation could enhance the perception of one’s political authority, for that attachment was considered by many late medieval Christian writers as both a sign and guarantor of divine and earthly power. Access to such entitlements was claimed by both English and French writers during the period of the Hundred Years War, as both sides sought to justify their internecine struggles over ownership of regions of France and its neighboring kingdoms. According to Lynn Staley, unlike the English monarchs of the late medieval period, French leaders Charles V and Charles VI, as the kings before them, could lay claim to a long-established piety and seemingly divine authority — Staley refers to this ideology as “sacral kingship.”** Her work charts the development of French royal rule as it established a direct link between the king and deity through such programs as civic performance, the coronation ordo, making of law, the king’s touch (granting the king miraculous healing virtues), liturgical formulae, and other strategies. She points out that, in England, the comparative absence of such sacralized power eventually led to perceptions of weakness in English monarchical command, and became a liability during the Hundred Years War, leaving the king comparatively powerless to hold his kingdom together and to sustain a long-term invasion of France.”
Building on Staley’s fine study of sacral kingship, I borrow and expand her term, applying it also to England’s Christian inhabitants, especially its writers, who were negotiating what I refer to as sacral identity. English literature about pilgrimage and crusade was written by and for people who were defining themselves both as a religious community and as a nation in competition with older, more firmly established European kingdoms. These separate discourses of national identity and Christian identity were intertwined within the notion of sacrality: in particular, English late medieval writing about Jerusalem expresses concerns about national prestige based on England’s relationship to the holy city. I hope to bring Jerusalem and the reputation of crusading prowess to the forefront by exploring these elements as tropes employed by English authors for sacralizing kingship and populace. This book therefore examines both the everyday interactions with Jerusalem (as seen in the pilgrim narratives), and the elevated claims to communal power, as articulated in contemporary romances, prose works, and theological writings. In the texts studied here, some late medieval English writers had already taken up the challenge of fashioning England’s sacramental presence.
NEGOTIATING THE PAST: REMEMBERING JERUSALEM, REFINING HISTORY
The fourteenth-century perception of England in the late medieval imaginary relied heavily on mythologies of England’s past, including its existence as Britain; it also depended upon a crusading past, both fabricated and real. The regnal genealogy of Britain extended to the historicized fall of Troy, as British peoples aligned themselves to Aeneas through his descendants. As Geraldine Heng has illustrated, this Trojan ancestry led easily to later myths of nation visible in the legends of King Arthur, forming what she refers to as the “conditional matrix” for imagining England.** Crusader and pilgrim ideologies that relate English ties to Jerusalem contributed to this imagined presence. Some of the texts I explore in this study show the important exercise of “remembering” one’s people as conquerors and inhabitants of that city. The second and third chapters of this book consider portrayals of Jerusalem in the romances, focusing especially on how these accounts creatively retell historical events in order to establish England’s ties to the holy city. In the romance of Richard, Coer de Lion (sic) this pattern becomes especially apparent as events of the Third Crusade depict King Richard I of England as a superior Christian monarch to King Philip II of France, and present the English as crusaders extraordinnaires. By portraying the thirteenth-century English soldiers as skilled warriors with abundant love for Jerusalem, the romancer makes invidious comparisons between the French and English that, as I argue here, would have had direct effect on English perceptions of the Hundred Years War. Certainly there were far more peoples involved in the war than those of France and England. This struggle involved conflicts on many fronts, including the involvement of Scotland, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Flanders, with their related counties, duchies, and kingdoms. For the most part, however, the texts studied here describe their adversaries as “French,” and focus on that country’s past associations with crusading. In Richard, Coer de Lion, for instance, English forces and their allies are set up against a monolithic French adversary in an effort to wrest control of Jerusalem from Islam, and, subsequently, from one another. These portrayals reflect the author’s interactions with chronicle sources and other idealizations of England’s political and spiritual position relative to its Continental neighbors. Similarly fictive elements are found in another anonymous fourteenthcentury romance, The Siege of Jerusalem. The poem is based on the Roman capture of the city in 70 C.E.; in this re-imagined narrative, Roman forces invade and destroy the city of Jerusalem, not for the sake of Caesar, but for love for Christ. English Christian audiences are encouraged to identify themselves with this indomitable Roman force, again suggesting an image of English crusading superiority. However, as I will show, recent readings of the romance’s Jewish adversaries as sympathetic figures lead to a new interpretation of the text not simply as a reflection and instrument of English nation building, but also as a devotional narrative, encouraging the moral reform of the soul. By renegotiating the histories of the first-century siege through the interpretative valences of exegesis, the poem comments on English morality. In particular, the poem’s Jewish Others can also be seen exegetically, as sufferers of divine disfavor who are compelled to reform; in this relation to reform, the poem’s first-century Jews and its late medieval Christian audiences become symbolically linked. Both writers of Richard, Coer de Lion and The Siege of Jerusalem deploy crusade rhetoric to engage in a moral dialogue with a Christian Other who poses a threat to the actual Jerusalem that the “crusaders” hope to attain; yet this Other also represents fallibility, and therefore is made to serve as a cautionary presence, warning that the romances’ Christian audiences stand to lose the Celestial Jerusalem through immorality.
The fourth chapter of this book assesses how the prose work, The Book of Sir John Mandeville, unites these discourses of authority and morality. Here, the Mandeville-writer, in his Prologue, chastises his English audiences, blaming their misdeeds for the “division of the world,” and other evils associated with the Papal Schism and Hundred Years War. The Mandeville-writer blames English shortcomings for the country’s political ills — this straightforward indictment of English behavior does not seek to alter other historical records, or to glorify the English, but it does encourage his audience toward moral reform. Here, individuals are to pursue Jerusalem inwardly; these private exercises, collectively performed, subsequently are calculated to affect the spiritual status of a nation.
The writer's systematic presentation of Jerusalem offers a meditative focal point which may have assisted in just such an operation. To this end, the narrative outlines the city, and even the world, as a fullscale mnemonic representation of Christian teaching. This depiction of place, along with that of the previous texts, suggests that crusade and pilgrimage had turned inward, moving from a communal exercise to an individual quest for personal morality. The Tvavels reflects a society whose biblical scholars and sermon writers prescribed spiritual pilgrimage and crusade as a solution for England’s political conflicts with France and the Avignon Papacy. Here, textual images which had once been designed to inspire actual pilgrimage and crusading take on a new role, encouraging these exercises to be performed not actually, but affectively.
VIRTUAL TRAVEL TO JERUSALEM IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Even those who could not participate physically in later crusades, whether for lack of opportunity, bodily restriction, or other reasons, were encouraged to take up meditative journeys to Jerusalem. While hopes of obtaining the Terrestrial Jerusalem had diminished after 1291, English medieval literature saw an outpouring of texts urging audiences to “capture” and “besiege” the holy city in their minds by reforming themselves to a Christian moral ideal. What had begun as a recruitment strategy had become the language of devotion and religious expression. This devotional exercise, which I call the crusade of the soul, owed much to the established tradition of interior pilgrimage.
This form of devotion, also referred to here as imagined or virtual pilgrimage (as opposed to external, actual, or place pilgrimage), was accepted as an exercise in many ways equal in spiritual merit to actual pilgrimage. A late medieval example of this is seen in Francis Petrarch who, in 1358, was invited by his friend Giovanni Mandelli to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Excusing himself from the journey, Petrarch instead composed his Itinerarium ad Sepulchrum Domini as an exquisitely detailed account of the journey, beginning in Milan and culminating in Jerusalem at the Tomb of the Holy Sepulchre.” According to Petrarch, who wrote his book over the space of three days, his text provided him a way to inhabit the Holy Land in spirit and also to accompany his friend without ever leaving his native Milan. In such travels Petrarch was not alone, for this type of interior experience was considered a viable means to increase Christian piety, and was popular in Europe from the eleventh through fourteenth centuries. In this meditative exercise, pilgrims followed the road to Jerusalem and journeyed by means of mental pictures created for them in travel literature, devotional texts, maps, and sermons.
Of the many ways medieval pilgrims could experience Jerusalem, the inner journey — popular within monasticism, anchoritic practice, and mysticism — was also practiced by the laity as a facet of meditative devotion. This form of travel was rooted in the traditions of the Desert Fathers whose rejection of the world was said to open up vast horizons on which to meditate. Such sentiment became formalized much later in monastic and anchoritic practices of the twelfth century, and was promoted by the likes of Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Geoffrey of Vendéme.*° This mystical form of travel was taken up in late medieval England by Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, and others. Rolle, for example, encourages meditation on Christ’s life for those who wish to increase their faith, instructing them to imagine the places of biblical narrative.*” Passion narratives inspired related exercises that focused on the humanity of Christ through tales of his life and suffering; for instance, Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ had an extensive readership among English, late medieval audiences.**
As is discussed here, some exercises of virtual pilgrimage were, by the fourteenth century, deeply affected by militant images that encouraged a type of inner crusade. The final chapter of this study assesses the works of two authors whose devotionally based texts deployed crusade rhetoric in order to portray the authors’ visions of morality, in which the goal is defined by individual and communal peace. These examples of crusade rhetoric and the Jerusalem relation are utilized in the fourteenth-century narrative, The Pilgrymage of the Lyfe of the Manhode, a Middle English translation of Guillaume de Deguileville’s poem, Le Pélerinage de la vie humaine.
Along with Guillaume’s work, I examine the intersections of religious piety and war between the English and French expressed in Philippe de Méziéres’ Songe du Vieil Pélerin and Epistre au Roi Richard. Each author represents Jerusalem as the reward for the attainment of peace, whether it be in the form of a balance between an individual’s inner vices and virtues, or concord of a larger scale, between the nations of England and France. Guillaume’s work illustrates the crusading morality passed down by Bernard of Clairvaux; in the Pélerinage, the protagonist must engage in military combat for the possession of his own soul. Armed by the Grace of God, he wields his spiritual weaponry against himself in an effort to overcome rebellious bodily desires and win peace from within.
Harmony of a different nature is promoted in Philippe’s work as the dream of “international” peace among Christian nations. This cooperation is described as pleasing to God, for it allows crusading against religious Others, and the possible attainment of Jerusalem. While this text holds out the actual Jerusalem as a reward, it employs a crusading discourse that promises that only the divinely favored and pure of heart would win the city. In this case, Philippe advocates for peace at home before seeking victory abroad; in implementing this domestic, communal harmony, England and France, figuratively, become Promised Lands in their own right. In this way, the works of pilgrimage and crusade, as well as the image of Jerusalem itself, were not only spiritualized but also harnessed in the service of nation building.
In exploring medieval uses of Jerusalem to define English religious and political identities, | borrow the lens of communitas articulated by Edith and Victor Turner. The Turners have employed this term to describe the goal of pilgrimage as a socially leveling experience shared by all participants.*” While the application of this notion of communitas to describe the aims of all forms of pilgrimage, from the early medieval to the present day, has been rightly questioned, the term itself does offer some utility in discussing texts of medieval itinerant devotion. The usage of the term, communitas, is qualified in this study: on the one hand I limit its use to define interactions with Jerusalem; on the other, I expand its application to highlight the phenomenon of perceived shared social experiences across time. This particular application of the term, communitas, usefully describes the social unity portrayed in these texts — here, this is a constructed image of unity, shared by an imagined community of medieval Christians, localized around the depiction of Jerusalem.
PAST SCHOLARLY APPROACHES: THE CONTEXT
Some components discussed in this study have already received scholarly assessment. For instance, interior pilgrimage has been treated in academic research and several scholars have examined the complex material and mental aspects of medieval travel.*° Other scholars have made significant contributions to the field of medieval, place pilgrimage since Jonathan Sumption assembled one of the foremost surveys on the subject in 1975.” In addition, much has been written about English participation in the medieval crusades, although until the late thirteenth century such military involvement was slight in comparison with England’s Continental neighbors.** Relatively little, however, has been done to consider crusade and pilgrimage literature together as textual phenomena, or to address these English works in light of the political atmosphere of the Hundred Years War and the Papal Schism.*?
Still less has been written about how, in relating desire for the holy city, portrayals of Jerusalem articulated expressions of incipient national identity in late medieval England. As I hope to show, English writings about travel to the holy city were part of a much larger project of constructing England in the image of Jerusalem and depicting its English citizens as the new Israelites. Through the use of crusade rhetoric and the Jerusalem relation, English writers fashioned a communal identity based on their perceptions of the Holy Land’s ideal inhabitants: deserving heirs of sacred space, blessed by God, and destined to prevail against the religious and territorial upheavals of the fourteenth century.
The primary sources considered in this study constitute a selective group of texts drawn from medieval romance, pilgrim narrative, crusade chronicle, devotional poetry, and correspondence. This selection offers a cross-section of disciplines illustrating the portrayals of a militant zeal for Jerusalem across a broad spectrum of genres and audiences. While such a small sampling cannot hope to cover exhaustively the full range of crusade and pilgrimage ideology, it does, however, seek to show the possible interactions among such works in order to create images of the Jerusalems of the English medieval imaginary. This study thereby hopes not to be the last word, but rather to offer a multi-disciplinary approach to the two closely related exercises of pilgrimage and crusade; moreover, it seeks to show that the contest for Jerusalem was every bit as concerned with politics at home, even when the prize existed in such far-flung reaches as outremer and the afterlife.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق