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Reviewed by:
  • Remembering the Crusades: Myth, Image, and Identity ed. by Nicholas Paul and Suzanne Yeager
  • Anthony Bale
Nicholas Paul and Suzanne Yeager, eds. Remembering the Crusades: Myth, Image, and Identity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Pp. x, 284. $65.00.

This is a timely and stimulating collection that seeks to yoke the history and rhetoric of crusading with “the work of memory,” “commemorative processes,” “collective memory,” and “the sacred or mythic past” (1–2). The book might seem to be part of the ongoing interest in the dynamic and sophisticated medieval mnemotechnic: that scholarly, organized, rhetorical, and playful but profoundly intellectual kind of memory, so comprehensively and productively explored by scholars such as Frances Yates, Mary Carruthers, and Lina Bolzoni. Yet whilst Carruthers is briefly mentioned in the book’s introduction in terms of Augustinian memoria as “the key to invention and a necessary component in imagination” (9), Paul and Yeager’s book is actually more interested in a less specific, and more contemporary, kind of memory: nostalgia, looking back, and the “invention of tradition.”

The book is divided into three logical parts: Part 1 is concerned with “Remembrance and Response” (three essays), Part 2 with “Sites and [End Page 421] Structures: Cities, Buildings, and Bodies” (four essays), and Part 3 with “Institutional Memory and Community Identity” (four essays). The book then charts its course from “event” (the First Crusade of 1096 and responses thereto) to memory in the longue durée (the replaying of the crusades by the knights Hospitaller and Templar).

There are some superb and truly outstanding individual essays here, pieces that make a major contribution to their fields. Christine Chism’s essay on “Memory, Wonder, and Desire in the Travels of Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Battuta” usefully introduces the category of wonder into an elegant reading of these two Muslim travelers’ accounts. Wonder, argues Chism, is “a trope that rivets attention and thus conduces to the questioning of cultural paradigms” (29). From this starting point, Chism probes Arabic genres of wonder, and considers how Ibn Jubayr, writing in the 1180s, saw the crusaders’ sudden eruption into his world. Ibn Jubayr’s narrative of the Levant, suggests Chism, “is an exercise in dynamic memory, continually restitching itself” (40). Chism here makes a really valuable point about the dynamism and contingency of memory. In her discussion of Ibn Battuta (writing in the 1350s), Chism considers the “emphatically postcrusade, melancholically postcolonial,” scarred landscape of Palestine (41), a world of touristic, but saddening, ruins. She follows Ibn Battuta to the Christian city of Constantinople, in order to show how his narrative traverses boundaries and therefore probes the “shared spaces that both Islam and Christianity hold dear in memory” (44). Chism’s brief but stimulating essay is a great place for the collection to start, because it raises interesting questions about the ways in which memory is culturally determined and contextually specific.

I also very much enjoyed reading Jaroslav Folda’s “Commemorating the Fall of Jerusalem: Remembering the First Crusade in Text, Liturgy, and Image.” Folda’s essay is a clear and engaging inquiry into illustrated copies of William of Tyre’s thirteenth-century History of Outremer, with some striking case studies. For this reader, Folda’s essay also brought into a very definite focus some of the issues about memory raised by the volume: that memorialization occurred more or less contemporary with the events being memorialized, and that the imagery and rhetoric of crusading remained vital and continued to change in the West from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. As Folda shows, such later commemoration cannot be dismissed as mere repetition of earlier stories, but rather had an urgent new meaning in the context of the fall of Constantinople (1453) and other places to the Ottomans. [End Page 422]

The final essay in the collection, and one of the most surprising, is also one of the strongest: Laura J. Whatley’s piece on “Visual Self-Fashioning and the Seals of the Knights Hospitaller in England.” Delving into the little-studied evanescent material culture of the Hospitallers, Whatley argues that seals allow us to see “how the Order of the Hospital of St John identified or fashioned itself...

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