Download PDF | Jessalynn L. Bird - Papacy, Crusade, and Christian-Muslim Relations-Amsterdam University Press (2018).
255 Pages
Pope Church, Faith and Culture in the Medieval West The essential aim of this series is to present high quality, original and international scholarship covering all aspects of the Medieval Church and its relationship with the secular world in an accessible form. Publications have covered such topics as The Medieval Papacy, Monastic and Religious Orders for both men and women, Canon Law, Liturgy and Ceremonial, Art, Architecture and Material Culture, Ecclesiastical Administration and Government, Clerical Life, Councils and so on. Our authors are encouraged to challenge existing orthodoxies on the basis of the thorough examination of sources. These books are not intended to be simple text books but to engage scholars worldwide. The series, originally published by Ashgate, has been published by Amsterdam University Press since 2018. Series editors: Brenda Bolton, Anne J. Duggan and Damian J. Smith
Introduction Jessalynn Bird
The essays collected in this volume represent the fruition of multiple sessions held in memory of Jim Powell (1930–2011) at the Midwest Medieval History Conference (2011), the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America (2012), the Western Michigan Medieval and Renaissance Conference at Kalamazoo (2012), the International Medieval Congress at Leeds (2012), and also at Syracuse University (2012), where Jim taught for over thirty years. These scholarly tributes bore eloquent testimony to Jim’s beneficence, generosity, and intellectual influence on a wide range of academics working in fields as various as religious movements (from lay devotion and sermons to the Teutonic Order, the Trinitarians, Dominicans, and Franciscans), the crusades, the papacy and its relations with imperial and royal powers (notably Frederick II), Christian–Jewish–Islamic relations, and Italian communes. Further witness to Jim as a historian and as a fine human being came in the sensitive introduction by Edward Peters to the posthumous collection of Jim’s essays printed in the former Ashgate Variorum series and a moving obituary written by Kenneth Pennington.1 Although some of the papers presented in Jim’s honour are being published elsewhere, the essays presented here not only pay homage to Jim’s lifetime accomplishments but also seek to highlight his contributions by pushing even further the boundaries of the fields in which he worked so fruitfully (perhaps at the risk of comparison to those medieval peasants rebuked by preachers for shifting boundary stones and encroaching on the carefully cultivated lands of others).
Mary Skinner’s contribution on ‘Lay Initiative in the Early Peace of God Movement, 980–1020’ is a fitting opening to the volume as it examines a subject which was to be treated by Jim in many incarnations: peace. Jim was profoundly dedicated to reexamining the complexities of the concept and practice of peace and the way in which it interlaced with religious movements embraced by the laity, including confraternities, the mendicant orders, and the crusades. His groundbreaking observations on the importance of peace negotiations and reform to Innocent III, Honorius III, and lay participants in the Fifth Crusade and the later crusade of Frederick II,3 his contextualization of Albertanus of Brescia’s involvement in communal and confraternal life and lay preaching,4 and his treatments of the missions of St Francis to al-Kamil in Egypt5 all dwelt on the conceptualization and realization of the ideal of peace, as did some of his most recent work on communal life in Italy,6 undertaken in preparation for an anticipated monograph on urban culture in thirteenth-century Italy.
The following essays in the first part of this volume are devoted to topics equally central to Jim’s labours as a historian. The edition and translation of the Deeds of Pope Innocent III7 and his collection of essays on the historiography of Innocent III, provocatively entitled Innocent III: vicar of Christ or lord of the world?8 reflect Jim’s efforts, together with those of historians such as Brenda Bolton, to recontextualize the significance of Innocent III’s papacy. He also crucially rehabilitated Honorius III, previously viewed as a doddering successor to the vigorous Innocent III, as a prescient and adept pope who possessed his own unique view of church reform and papal–imperial relations.9 Jim also undertook pioneering work by using sermons and sermon literature as a window into medieval thought and culture, not only for Albertanus of Brescia but as a means of reassessing the self-image and goals of Innocent III and Honorius III. As a result of Jim’s significant exploration of Honorius III, interest in this formerly neglected pontificate has boomed.
A reappraisal of Honorius’s approach to the East and an edition of some of his letters have been recently published by PierreVincent Claverie, while selections from Honorius’s registers on Frankish Greece and Constantinople have been recently edited by Christopher Schabel and William Duba.10 Another important treatment of Honorius’s relations with the East has recently been published by Thomas W. Smith.11 The essay by Iben Fonnesberg-Schmidt in this volume extends Jim’s research on Honorius III’s sermons as a means of gaining insight into papal self-perception,12 while Thomas W. Smith’s analysis of the arengae of crusade encyclicals produced during the pontificates of Innocent III and Honorius III reveals important differences in their approach to crusading. Exploring the relatively little-known crusade of William VI of Montferrat, Ben Halliburton helps to revise further our perception of Honorius III (and his successor Gregory IX) through a reevaluation of their attempts to salvage a viable crusade (or rather crusades) from the aftermath of the defeat at Damietta. Jim devoted a considerable portion of his scholarly life to the study of the crusades, not only in his award-winning Anatomy of a Crusade: 1217–1221, but in a steady stream of perceptive articles on the historiography of the crusades from their initiation to their eventual demise.13
It was at his insistence and with his crucial partnership (without which the project would never have come to fruition), that he, Edward Peters and Jessalynn Bird produced a collection of sources entitled Crusade and Christendom: annotated documents in translation from Innocent III to the fall of Acre, 1187–1291. Jim’s conscientious editing of the final draft of this book was one of his final projects and reflected his dedication to a careful reading and appreciation of primary source material of all stripes. It was work on this volume which inspired Edward Peters’ magisterial reassessment of Innocent III’s attempts to launch the Fourth Crusade, which must be coloured by an appreciation of the disasters which preceded it rather than retrospectively dominated by the spectre of a sacked Constantinople.14 The importance of papal legates for the successful organization of joint crusade and reform efforts treated by Powell is reinforced by Jan Vandeburie’s depiction of Jacques de Vitry’s career in the East as Honorius III’s war correspondent and reporter and corrector of political and religious conditions in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Jim likewise recognized early on the essential nature of the processions and prayers instituted by Innocent III for the crusade and the interweaving of crusade and reform and peace efforts in expanding participation in the crusade to social groups, including women.15 My own essay examines how preachers and liturgists described the significance of these processions to their participants and how prayers, processions, and sermons served to unite the home and military fronts on the Albigensian and Fifth Crusades. Megan Cassidy-Welch richly illustrates how the memory of the capture of Damietta during the Fifth Crusade impacted representations of Louis IX’s crusade and French perceptions of crusading in the thirteenth century and beyond, much as Jim himself probed how the image of the First Crusade was employed in histories, papal bulls, and sermons.16 Lastly, but certainly not least, Jim himself made several significant contributions to the reappraisal of Christian–Muslim relations in Sicily, in Spain, in the Holy Land, and in Egypt.
Jay Rubenstein’s evocative essay similarly examines how complex attitudes towards the peoples whom the crusaders found living in the Holy Land shifted over time to something approximating Christopher MacEvitt’s ‘rough tolerance’ (although recently arrived Westerners would always suspect those who settled in the Holy Land of ‘going native’ or ‘going soft’). Matthew Parker follows in Jim’s footsteps with his creative fusion of the study of Italy, the crusades, and Christian–Muslim relations which traces Pisa’s attempts to establish a trading presence in the Holy Land, Constantinople, and Alexandria. He draws a fascinating picture of the political, economic, and military interactions of the Pisans with Muslim, Byzantine, and Latin Christian powers Outremer. Michael Lower, one of the few crusade historians versed in Arabic as well as western languages, gives us an important reexamination of Muslim attitudes towards both peace treaties with and paying tribute to Christian powers in the later thirteenth century. All three papers call into question the assumed categories so often applied to Christian–Muslim relations in the Mediterranean, categories such as ‘tolerance’, ‘persecution’, and ‘convivencia’ which Powell largely imploded in his examination of Frederick II’s treatment of Muslims in Sicily and in the collections of essays he edited as Tolerance and Intolerance: social conflict in the age of the crusades (with the collaboration of Michael Gervers) and as Muslims under Latin Rule, 1100–1300. 17
As in any project involving scholars dispersed over many continents with obligations too Sisyphean to list here, there have been the inevitable delays and setbacks. But I think that Jim would be proud of what has been brought together here, which we fondly dedicate to his memory. Special thanks must be given here to Edward Peters, John Smedley, and Michael Powell for their support for this project, to Damian Smith, Anne Duggan, and Brenda Bolton as series editors, and to the contributors for their perseverance and patience. About the author: Jessalynn Bird, Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame,
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