The Crusades at Home: Roots, Impact, and Cultural Significance of the Crusades in France and Occitania I

Sponsoring Organization(s)

Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Univ. of Tennessee-Knoxville

Organizer Name

Thomas Lecaque

Organizer Affiliation

Univ. of Tennessee-Knoxville

Presider Name

Simon Parsons

Presider Affiliation

Royal Holloway, Univ. of London

Paper Title 1

Remaking Romanitas: Raymond of Saint-Gilles as the Last Roman Emperor

Presenter 1 Name

Thomas Lecaque

Paper Title 2

Imagining the Holy City: Troubadour Depictions of Jerusalem during the Crusades, 1100–1300

Presenter 2 Name

Lauren Mulholland

Presenter 2 Affiliation

Queen Mary, Univ. of London

Paper Title 3

"Straight Through from the Beginning": Reading, Devotion, and Paris, BnF lat. 5135A

Presenter 3 Name

Bradley Phillis

Presenter 3 Affiliation

Univ. of Tennessee-Knoxville

Start Date

14-5-2016 1:30 PM

Session Location

Bernhard 213

Description

The proposed sessions would comprise part of a larger series of academic events exploring the topic of the relationship between continental 'France', broadly conceived, and the crusades, with counterpart sessions proposed for the 2016 Leeds International Medieval Congress, UK, and in the same year at the Institute of Historical Research in London. The papers for these events are hoped to be collated into an edited collection of the same name ('The Crusades at Home: Roots, Impact, and Cultural Significance of the Crusades in France and Occitania'), for which a publisher is currently being sought. The co-organizers, Tom Lecaque and Simon Parsons, are both early-career academics from the US and UK respectively, bringing together colleagues, co-researchers, and more established scholars to collaborate in a transnational project which is exciting in its breadth of disciplinary approaches and range of source material. Individuals from across two continents who have expressed an interest in participating in the proposed Kalamazoo panels use texts as diverse as Carolingian saints lives, thirteenth-century chansons de geste, troubadour poems, and crusading charters from medieval Flanders to re-envisage how mainland France and its inhabitants provoked, responded to, and conceptualized the crusading movement.

These approaches characterize a new understanding of the direction forwards in crusading studies, now ascendant, which moves away from isolated case studies of the importance of the crusade solely from a 'crusading/crusader states' perspective to consider these expeditions, movements, and preaching events in medieval European geopolitical and cultural context. The influence of scholastic, apocalyptic, monastic, and eschatological thought - at the heart of medieval France's self conception - has been demonstrated to have deeply influenced the crusading movement, and, in turn, been influenced by it: see recently, for example, the work of Marcus Bull and Damien Kempf on the power of monastic literary transmission in the introduction to their edition of the Robert the Monk's Historia, Jay Rubenstein on apocalyptic concerns and the Liber Floridus, an encyclopedic twelfth-century Flemish florilegium , and Jan Vandeburie on the French crusade preacher Jacques de Vitry. New avenues of approach of prosopography have been used to reconstruct networks of nobles whose crusading credentials were often passed through family and kinship bonds, or bonds of patronage (Daniel Power's work on French participation in the Albigensian crusade, Nicholas Paul on the role of family memory in crusade involvement, James Doherty on the crusading connections of Count Hugh of Troyes). In essence, the frontiers of crusade studies have moved 'home'; and these proposed sessions reflect this historiographical trend.

It is proposed that the two sessions will be divided along the lines of those concerned predominately with the langue d'oc in one session, and the langue d'oïl in the other (although each will be broadly conceived) to promote thematic unity, but the same audience will be envisaged for each. Preliminary discussions have already resulted in significant interest from scholars working directly on crusade studies and those focused on medieval history more generally; it is for this reason, and to promote a wider range of responses from scholars across departments, that two sessions would be necessary. Although both of the organizers are associated with History departments, at the University of Tennessee Knoxville and Royal Holloway, University of London respectively, the nature of the proposed panels is deliberately such that it should appeal to speakers and audiences across the multifarious disciplines of medieval studies, in keeping with the Congress' brief. The International Congress on Medieval Studies will be cited in the title of the proposed edited collection, with thanks in the acknowledgments, publication of which will result from the sessions. It is hoped that these proposed sessions will constitute part of a continuation of a tradition of crusade studies at Kalamazoo presenting vibrant, groundbreaking research, in a period where this academic field is becoming increasingly open to interdisciplinary influences and considerations.

Thomas Lecaque

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May 14th, 1:30 PM

The Crusades at Home: Roots, Impact, and Cultural Significance of the Crusades in France and Occitania I

Bernhard 213

The proposed sessions would comprise part of a larger series of academic events exploring the topic of the relationship between continental 'France', broadly conceived, and the crusades, with counterpart sessions proposed for the 2016 Leeds International Medieval Congress, UK, and in the same year at the Institute of Historical Research in London. The papers for these events are hoped to be collated into an edited collection of the same name ('The Crusades at Home: Roots, Impact, and Cultural Significance of the Crusades in France and Occitania'), for which a publisher is currently being sought. The co-organizers, Tom Lecaque and Simon Parsons, are both early-career academics from the US and UK respectively, bringing together colleagues, co-researchers, and more established scholars to collaborate in a transnational project which is exciting in its breadth of disciplinary approaches and range of source material. Individuals from across two continents who have expressed an interest in participating in the proposed Kalamazoo panels use texts as diverse as Carolingian saints lives, thirteenth-century chansons de geste, troubadour poems, and crusading charters from medieval Flanders to re-envisage how mainland France and its inhabitants provoked, responded to, and conceptualized the crusading movement.

These approaches characterize a new understanding of the direction forwards in crusading studies, now ascendant, which moves away from isolated case studies of the importance of the crusade solely from a 'crusading/crusader states' perspective to consider these expeditions, movements, and preaching events in medieval European geopolitical and cultural context. The influence of scholastic, apocalyptic, monastic, and eschatological thought - at the heart of medieval France's self conception - has been demonstrated to have deeply influenced the crusading movement, and, in turn, been influenced by it: see recently, for example, the work of Marcus Bull and Damien Kempf on the power of monastic literary transmission in the introduction to their edition of the Robert the Monk's Historia, Jay Rubenstein on apocalyptic concerns and the Liber Floridus, an encyclopedic twelfth-century Flemish florilegium , and Jan Vandeburie on the French crusade preacher Jacques de Vitry. New avenues of approach of prosopography have been used to reconstruct networks of nobles whose crusading credentials were often passed through family and kinship bonds, or bonds of patronage (Daniel Power's work on French participation in the Albigensian crusade, Nicholas Paul on the role of family memory in crusade involvement, James Doherty on the crusading connections of Count Hugh of Troyes). In essence, the frontiers of crusade studies have moved 'home'; and these proposed sessions reflect this historiographical trend.

It is proposed that the two sessions will be divided along the lines of those concerned predominately with the langue d'oc in one session, and the langue d'oïl in the other (although each will be broadly conceived) to promote thematic unity, but the same audience will be envisaged for each. Preliminary discussions have already resulted in significant interest from scholars working directly on crusade studies and those focused on medieval history more generally; it is for this reason, and to promote a wider range of responses from scholars across departments, that two sessions would be necessary. Although both of the organizers are associated with History departments, at the University of Tennessee Knoxville and Royal Holloway, University of London respectively, the nature of the proposed panels is deliberately such that it should appeal to speakers and audiences across the multifarious disciplines of medieval studies, in keeping with the Congress' brief. The International Congress on Medieval Studies will be cited in the title of the proposed edited collection, with thanks in the acknowledgments, publication of which will result from the sessions. It is hoped that these proposed sessions will constitute part of a continuation of a tradition of crusade studies at Kalamazoo presenting vibrant, groundbreaking research, in a period where this academic field is becoming increasingly open to interdisciplinary influences and considerations.

Thomas Lecaque