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146 chapter six Erasing the Body History and Memory in Medieval Siege Poetry suzanne conklin akbari For medieval readers, the experience of crusade could be recollected through two distinct discursive forms: the historical narration of chronicle accounts and the poetic narration found in the literary forms of epic and romance. This distinction is, needless to say, a false binary: as scholars such as Nancy Partner and Gabrielle Spiegel have shown, there is often a strongly literary quality to even the most sober historiography, and as Robert Stein and Robert Hanning have shown, a rich vein of historiography runs though the most elaborately poetic texts of the High Middle Ages.∞ This chapter explores the nexus of historiography and poetics through a particular focus on two Middle English poems, both titled The Siege of Jerusalem even though they recount two very different historical moments: one describes the fall of Jerusalem to the crusaders in the late eleventh century, following the historical account of William of Tyre, while the other narrates the fall of Jerusalem to the invading Roman army in the service of Titus and Vespasian in the first century. The essay places these two accounts of the siege of Jerusalem in the context of the literary tradition centered on the violent fall of imperial cities, especially the abundant literature devoted to Troy. The context offered here is a broad one, ranging from antiquity through the early modern period and even—in the case of Ismail Kadare’s novel The Siege— as far as the present day. This breadth is necessary in order to bring out the ways in which the siege and fall of a city are used as a kind of narrative shorthand to encapsulate complex moments of historical change. One might describe the function of poetics in this mode of writing as a ‘‘crystallization ’’ of a temporal shift, making visible what is normally unable to Erasing the Body 147 be seen. Accordingly, I focus particularly upon this process of crystallization through poetics, as symbolic forms—first, the city itself; second, the male body; third, the tomb that encases the body—are used to mark significant moments in history, points of rupture that mark a discontinuity between one period of time and another. In earlier work on The Siege of Jerusalem, I argued that it is fruitful to juxtapose the fourteenth-century alliterative poem of that name, which focuses on the fall of Jewish-ruled Jerusalem to the invading Roman armies of Titus and Vespasian in the first century, with the fifteenth-century Middle English work of the same name, which is based on the Latin chronicle of William of Tyre (through an Old French intermediary) and recounts the fall of Muslim-ruled Jerusalem in the late eleventh century to the Christian armies of the First Crusade.≤ While these two works narrate very different historical moments, they share a common focus on the central role of the city in the unfolding of sacred history. In each text, the fall of the city marks a significant moment in the articulation of the divine plan: the fall of Jerusalem in the first century paves the way for the foundation of a Christian Rome and, ultimately, the establishment of papal rule, while the fall of Jerusalem in the eleventh century brings about not only Christian rule of the Holy Land but also—at least in the views of the first generations of crusade chroniclers—the imminent End Times.≥ One way of analyzing these works, pursued in my own earlier work as well as (in far richer detail) in Suzanne Yeager’s Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative, is by viewing them within the multiple and polyvalent traditions of writing about Jerusalem: the holy city was at once the center of prediasporic Jewish community, the site of Christ’s ministry and crucifixion, the symbolic center of the world as seen on medieval maps, and the spiritual homeland of every devout Christian soul.∂ Another way of analyzing these works, which I pursue here, is to displace Jerusalem as a singular, unique phenomenon and instead to examine depictions of the besieged city more broadly to see the common ground of these narratives. In this way, it is possible to develop a fuller understanding of how narrations of siege enabled premodern writers to make sense of historical change. It is important to emphasize that this is not simply a question of literary genre, studied so well by Malcolm Hebron; instead, what is at stake is the...

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