3.0

Average Course Rating

From the late eleventh century to the close of the thirteenth, European pilgrims, knights, foot soldiers, merchants, and travelers, visited, fought, colonized, and settled in the Holy Land, that is along the Mediterranean coast stretching from modern Turkey to Egypt, creating a principality known as the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem or what scholars have called the Crusader Near East. This territory became the location of fiercely contested borders, religious identities, and political alliances, but it was also the site of vibrant artistic and cultural production. This course will interrogate what scholars mean by crusader culture. We will analyze different types of sources and materials including texts, textiles, architecture, manuscript illumination, sculpture, metalworks, and ivory. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach – with the goal of coordinating the lives and experiences of people living in the Crusader Near East, with the documents, and visual and material culture they produced, consumed, and exchanged with western Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic world. One of the goals is to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation for the context of cultural production and to consider and critique the terminologies and narratives about crusading, including concepts of acculturation, translation, and hybridity.