The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: A Corpus. Vol. 3: The City of Jerusalem (review)

The long-anticipated third volume of Denys Pringle's magisterial Corpus will undoubtedly be the most consulted as it is devoted to the churches of Jerusalem, the capital of the Crusader Kingdom from 1099 to 1187. The volume appears nine years after the second and fourteen years after the first and, it would appear, twenty-eight years after the project was initiated. Although this was projected to be the final volume of the Corpus, the quantity of material proved to be too substantial, and we must now await a fourth volume to complete the series, containing the churches of Acre and Tyre, as well as the addenda and corrigenda.

The Corpus is effectively redefining how crusader architecture is studied, for it is significantly expanding the parameters of inquiry. Prior to its publication, scholars relied on Camille Enlart's Les monuments de croisés dans le royaume de Jérusalem (Paris, 1925–28) as the most thorough treatment of the subject, although it discussed only about sixty buildings. Much additional research has been done since Enlart's time, but the sites are often difficult to access and the publications equally difficult to locate. Volume 3 adds eighty-seven churches to the total, raising the ante to 370. With the final volume, the total should approach 500. In addition to well-preserved buildings, Pringle includes those known only from archaeology or the textual record, and several that remain unidentified.

Well researched and well organized, the Corpus is a model of orderly and authoritative documentation. The present volume assimilates all publications up to around 2004 and combines them with field surveys of the surviving buildings and standing remains. The entries provide topographical coordinates to relate the buildings to the maps included at the end of the volume. Each entry begins with a discussion of the history and (if necessary) identification of the site, as well as with a survey of the sources and historical literature. Buildings are described in detail and illustrated with current and historical photographs—the latter critical for altered or lost buildings. Plans, elevations, and reconstruction drawings have been redone from existing drawings, modified where necessary, or produced anew based on Pringle's fieldwork. The result is a visual consistency rarely achieved in publications of this sort. Verbal descriptions include, where appropriate, architectural decorations, furnishings, associated buildings, epigraphy, frescoes, mosaics, and masons' marks. Each major entry concludes with a balanced assessment of the scholarship on the subject.

In the final analysis, Pringle is more concerned with the documentation than with the interpretation, which he is content to leave to others. Rarely does he launch into speculation of an art-historical nature, and most often the conclusions are guarded. I am not quite ready to abandon the association of the eleventh-century Holy Sepulchre with Constantine IX Monomachos, as Pringle does, following Martin Biddle (pp. 11–12). Nor am I convinced by his restoration of the Church of the Ascension, with its awkward vaulting system (pp. 78 ff.); indeed, it is unclear from his plan (figure 9) what survives and what he proposes. Still, this section represents the clearest analysis in print of a very difficult building. The same holds true for St. Mary on Mount Sion: although the analysis is clear, the reconstruction remains unconvincing. The analysis of the monuments in the area of the Muristan area is also noteworthy.

Quibbles are minor. I would have liked more attention to the construction techniques, or at least a better indication of what sort of evidence Pringle is relying upon to make chronological distinctions or as evidence for reconstruction. In general, masonry techniques are poorly illustrated in the plates and unrepresented in the drawings. In terms of presentation, the system of parenthetical notes adopted in the earlier volumes becomes unmanageable with the major monuments of Jerusalem, for...