Liturgy and Devotion in the Crusader States

Examining liturgy as historical evidence has, in recent years, developed into a flourishing field of research. The chapters in this volume offer innovative discussion of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem from the perspective of ’liturgy in history’. They demonstrate how the total liturgical experience, which was visual, emotional, motile, olfactory, and aural, can be analysed to understand the messages that liturgy was intended to convey. The chapters reveal how combining narrative sources with liturgical documents can help decode political circumstances and inter-group relations and decipher the core ideals of the community of Outremer. Moreover, understanding the Latins’ liturgical activities in the Holy Land has much to contribute to our understanding of the crusade as an institution, how crusade spirituality was practised on the ground in the Latin East, and how people engaged with the crusading movement.

This volume brings together eight original studies, forwarded by the editors’ introduction, on the liturgy of Jerusalem, spanning the immediate pre-Crusade and Crusade period (11th-13th centuries). It demonstrates the richness of a focus on the liturgy in illuminating the social, religious, and intellectual history of this critical period of ecclesiastical self-assertion, as well as conceptions of the sacred in this time and place.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Medieval History.

Iris Shagrir is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History, Philosophy and Judaic Studies at the Open University of Israel, Ra’anana, Israel. She specialises in crusade history, religious and cultural history of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, pilgrimage, liturgy in the Latin East, and medieval anthroponymy. Her work includes The Crusades: History and Historiography (2014); The Parable of the Three Rings and the Idea of Religious Toleration in Premodern European Culture (2017), and Communicating the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Sophia Menache (co-editor, 2018).

Cecilia Gaposchkin is Professor of History and Assistant Dean of Faculty for Pre-Major Advising at Dartmouth College, Hanover, USA. She is the author of The Making of Saint Louis: Kingship, Sanctity and Crusade in the Later Middle Ages (2008); Blessed Louis, Most Glorious of Kings: Texts Relating to the Cult of Saint Louis of France (2012); The Sanctity of Louis IX: Early Lives of Saint Louis by Geoffrey of Beaulieu and William of Chartres (with Sean Field and Larry Field, 2014); and Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology (2017).