Course description and objectives

This course examines the interrelated phenomena of crusade, pilgrimage, and mission in Europe between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries C.E.  While we will read some first-hand accounts of contemporaries’ experiences on the frontiers of Christendom, our primary objective will be to assess, from a variety of intellectual perspectives, how the dominant Christian culture of western Europe perceived and interacted with non-Christian communities along its periphery.  Using a wide range of secondary critical works by historians and anthropologists we will analyze, among other things: how historians have grappled with defining crusade, debates on the interrelationship between center and periphery in medieval culture, life in frontier societies, the role of the witness in foreign cultures, the ritual and communal aspects of pilgrimage, and the ways in which western thinkers intellectually accommodated the idea of the "other."  Our course objectives will be: (1) to gain a reasonably specific contextual knowledge of the historical phenomena treated in class; (2) to develop skills in primary and secondary source criticism and appling theory to primary sources; (3) to learn the craft of conceiving, researching, and writing research projects.

Evaluation and assignments

Students will be evaluated according to the following criteria:

Active participation and attendance - 25%
    As this is a small group seminar, it is imperative that students come prepared to each class and actively contribute to class discussions and group work.  Any student with three or more unexcused absences will fail the course.
Formal in-class presentation of research and research group bibliography - 25%
    Details to be announced in class.
Research paper (ca. 15 pp. for undergrads, 20 pp. for grads) - 50%
    The research paper will form the core component of the course, and will be broken into stages with graded segments due at various times during the quarter.

Required texts
 

• A course packet (CP), available for sale at the Bookstore. [To mitigate the cost of the reader, all course packet materials will be placed on reserve (OR) or will be made available by the instructor for students to copy.]
• Robert of Clari, The Conquest of Constantinople, trans. E. H. McNeal (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1998) [Note: an earlier, 1969 edition of this translation was published by W.W. Norton & Company and may be available for sale in used bookstores]
• Christopher Dawson, trans., Mission to Asia (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1980) [Note: an earlier edition of this trans., entitled The Mongol Mission, was published by Harper & Row in 1966]
• Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe. Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993)
• Christopher Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1998) Syllabus

Syllabus

Tues., April 2 - Introduction

Thurs., April 4 – No class!

I. Pilgrimage

Tues., April 9 - Pilgrimage: Theory and Context

Readings: Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, ch. 1: “Pilgrimage as a Liminoid Phenomenon” (pp. 1-39) (CP/OR); Sabine MacCormack, “Loca Sancta: The Organization of Sacred Topography in Late Antiquity,” in The Blessings of Pilgrimage, ed. R. Ousterhout (pp. 7-40) (CP/OR)

Further Reading: From the many monographs on the subject, see R. C. Finucane, Jonathan Sumption, Diana Webb]

Thurs., April 11 - Pilgrimage in action

Readings: Egeria’s Travels, trans. J. Wilkinson, pp. 91-128 (CP/Available from Instructor); Raoul of Saint-Sépulcre, The Life of Lietbertus, Bishop of Cambrai, trans. J. Ott (CP/Available from Instructor); William Melczer, trans., The Pilgrim's Guide to Santiago de Compostela, pp. 85-102, 119-133 (OR/Available from Instructor)

Further reading: E. D. Hunt, “The Itinerary of Egeria: Reliving the Bible in Fourth-Century Palestine,” in The Holy Land, Holy Lands, and Christian History, ed. R. N. Swanson, Studies in Church History, vol. 36 (Boydell, 2001)

Tues., April 16 - The witness and authority

Readings: Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, Introduction and ch. 1 (pp. 1-45) (CP/OR);  Robert Bartlett, Making of Europe, ch. 1 (also OR)

Further reading: Giles Constable, “Opposition to Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages,” Studia Gratiana 19 (1976): 124-46 (Available from Instructor)

II. Crusade

Thurs., April 18 - Cultural preconditions for the formation of a militia Christi

Readings: Robert Bartlett, Making of Europe, ch. 2, pp. 24-43; Carl Erdmann, The Origin  of the Idea of Crusade, Intro and ch. 2 (pp. 3-34, 57-94) (CP/Available from Instructor)

Further reading: Georges Duby, “Laity and the Peace of God,” in The Chivalrous Society, trans. C. Postan (pp. 123-33); The Annalist of Nieder-Altaich: “The Great German Pilgrimage of 1064-65,” in The Medieval Internet Sourcebook (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/1064pilgrim.html); E. Joranson, “The Great German Pilgrimage of 1064-65,” in The Crusades and Other Historical Essays Presented to D.C. Munro (New York, 1928) [D6.C7]

Tues., April 23 - Historical context of just war

Readings: “Urban II's speech at Clermont, 1095 (five versions)” (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/urban2-5vers.html); Carl Erdmann,  The Origin of the Idea of Crusade, chs. 9-10 (pp. 300-54) (CP/Available from Instructor); Jonathan Riley-Smith, “Crusading as an Act of Love,” History 65 (June 1980): 177-92 (CP/Periodical on microfilm at PSU)

Thurs., April 25 - Ideals and experience

Readings: H.E.J. Cowdrey, “Martyrdom and the First Crusade,” in The Crusades and Latin Monasticism, 11th-12th Centuries (Variorum, 1999), ch. 7(CP/OR); “A Crusade Charter of Lambert, Bishop of Thérouanne,” in C. K. Slack, ed., Crusade Charters, 1138-1270 (Arizona, 2001), pp. 126-129 (CP/OR); Robert of Clari, The Conquest of Constantinople (read all; you may skip or skim introduction)

Further Reading: James A. Brundage, “Prostitution, Miscegenation and Sexual Purity in the First Crusade,” in Crusade and Settlement, ed. Peter W. Edbury (pp. 57-65)  (Available from Instructor); Gary Dickson, Religious Enthusiasm in the Medieval West (Ashgate: Variorum, 2000) [collected essays, in library]

Tues., April 30 - Crusading and hatred of Jews

Readings: Soloman bar Samson, “The Crusaders in Mainz, May 27, 1096” (On-line at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/1096jews-mainz); Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade, ch. 7 (pp. 192-222, with glossary of terms on pp. 353-355) (CP/OR)

Further Reading: Shlomo Eidelberg, ed. and trans., The Jews and the Crusaders. The Hebrew Chronicles of the First and Second Crusades (Wisconsin, 1977); Kenneth Stow, “Conversion, Apostasy, and Apprehensiveness: Emicho of Flonheim and the Fear of Jews in the Twelfth Century,” Speculum 76:4 (October 2001): 911-933

Thurs., May 2 - Muslim perspectives on holy war and the Crusades

Readings: Fred M. Donner, “The Sources of Islamic Conceptions of War,” in Just War and Jihad. Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on War and Peace in Western and Islamic Traditions, ed. J. Kelsay and James Turner Johnson (NY: Greenwood Press, 1991), pp. 31-69 (CP/OR); Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Chicago, 1999), ch. 3 (pp. 89-170 – relax, many pages are of images and pictures) (CP/OR)

Further Reading: Robert Irwin, “Islam and the Crusades,” in Oxford History of the Crusades, ed. J. Riley-Smith (Oxford, 1998), ch. 10.

Tues., May 7 - Muslim views of the Franks and daily life in the crusader states

Readings: Francesco Gabrieli, trans., Arab Historians of the Crusades, pp. 87-113 (on Saladin), 146-75 (on the Muslim reconquest of Jerusalem) (CP/OR); Benjamin Z. Kedar, “The Subjected Muslims of the Frankish Levant,” ch. 4 in Muslims under Latin Rule, 1100-1300, ed. James M. Powell, pp. 135-174 (CP/OR)

Further Reading: Anna Comnena, The Alexiad, trans. E. R. A. Sewter (Penguin, 1969); Bernard Hamilton, “Knowing the Enemy: Western Understanding of Islam at the Time of  the Crusades,” ch. 11 in idem, Crusaders, Cathars and the Holy Places (Ashgate, 1999)  [BR270.H36]

Reading: Christopher J. Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades (read all)

Further reading: Peter Raedts, “The Children's Crusade of 1212,” Journal of Medieval History 3 (1977): 279-82, 289-324 (Available from Instructor); Gary Dickson, Religious Enthusiasm in the Medieval West (Ashgate, 2000) [collected essays, incl. two on the so-called Children’s or Shepherd’s Crusade of 1212] [BR112 D53]

Tues., May 14 - Crusaders as colonists: The Prawer thesis examined

Readings: Robert Bartlett, Making of Europe, pp. 43-59 and ch. 4; Joshua Prawer, The Crusaders’ Kingdom: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages, ch. 18: “The Legacy of an Epoch” (pp. 469-533) (OR)

Thurs., May 16 - Crusaders as colonists: Other considerations

Readings: Robert Bartlett, Making of Europe, chs. 6-7, 8 (pp. 197-211), and 9; Francis  James West, “The Colonial History of the Norman Conquest?” History 84 (April 1999): 219-36 (CP/OR)

Tues., May 21 - Crusader culture

Reading: Denys Pringle, “Architecture in the Latin East, 1098-1571,” in The Oxford History of the Crusades, ed. J. Riley-Smith, pp. 155-175 (CP/OR); Bernard Hamilton, “Rebuilding Zion: The Holy Places of Jerusalem in the Twelfth Century,” in Renaissance and Renewal in Christian History, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), pp. 105-116 (CP/Available from Instructor)

Further Readings: Nurith Kenaan-Kedar, “Symbolic Meaning in Crusader Architecture: The Twelfth-Century Dome of the Holy Sepulcher Church in Jerusalem,” Cahiers archéologiques 34 (1986): 109-117; Jaroslav Folda, “Art in the Latin East, 1098-1291,” ch. 7 in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, ed. J. Riley-Smith (pp. 141-59)

Guest presentation: Jean Brodahl, Art Department, will speak on crusader art and architecture

III. Mission

Thurs., May 23 - Medieval missions to the East and “missionary syndrome”

Reading: Christopher Dawson, trans., Mission to Asia (John of Plano Carpini, History of the Mongols); R. I. Burns, “The Missionary Syndrome: Crusader and Pacific Northwest Religious Expansionism,” Comparative Studies of Society and History (1988): 271-285 (CP/OR)

Further reading: William D. Phillips, Jr., “Voluntary Strangers: European Merchants and Missionaries in Asia during the Late Middle Ages,” in The Stranger in Medieval Society, ed. F.R.P. Akehurst and S. Cain Van d'Elden, pp. 14-26. [PN 682 S75 S77]; Sophia Menache, “Tartars, Jews, Saracens and the Jewish-Mongol ‘Plot’ of 1241,” History. The Journal of the Historical Association (July 1996): 319-342

Tues., May 28 - Missionaries as “witnesses”

Readings: Christopher Dawson, trans., Mission to Asia (William of Rubruck, Journey); Mary Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, ch. 3. 'The Utter East" (pp. 87-121) (CP/OR)

Further Reading: Ora Limor, "Missionary Merchants: Three Medieval Anti-Jewish Works  from Genoa," Journal of Medieval History 17 (1991): 35-51 (Available from Instructor)

Thurs., May 30 - Linkage: crusading and missions

Reading: Benjamin Z. Kedar, Crusade and Mission. European Approaches toward the Muslims, chs. 3, 5 (pp. 97-135, 159-203) (OR)

Further Reading: Elizabeth Siberry, "Missionaries and Crusaders, 1095-1274: Opponents or Allies?" Studies in Church History 20 (1983): 103-110 (Available from Instructor); James M. Powell, "The Papacy and the Muslim Frontier," in Muslims under Latin Rule, 1100-1300, ed. James M. Powell, pp. 175-204 (OR)

Readings: George Rogers Taylor, ed., The Turner Thesis: Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History (pp. 1-33) (CP/OR); William Urban, “The Frontier Thesis and the Baltic Crusade,” in Crusade and Conversion on the Baltic Frontier, 1150-1500, ed. Alan V. Murray (Ashgate, 2001), pp. 45-71 (OR)

Further Reading: Archibald R. Lewis, “The Closing of the Mediaeval Frontier, 1250-1350,” Speculum 33 (Oct. 1958): 475-483 (Also available via J-Stor)

Presentation of Group Projects (begin)

Reading: Robert Bartlett, Making of Medieval Europe, chs. 11-12

Further Reading: Manuel González Jiménez, “Frontier and Settlement in the Kingdom of Castile (1085-1350)” and R. I. Burns, “The Significance of the Frontier in the Middle Ages,” both in Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. R. Bartlett and A. MacKay (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989)

Presentation of Group Projects (fin.)