Search results for ""Author Marcus Bull""

The idea of what an "eyewitness" account is here scrutinised through examination of key Crusading texts. Eyewitness is a familiar label that historians apply to numerous pieces of evidence. It carries compelling connotations of trustworthiness and particular proximity to the lived experience of historical actors. But it has received surprisingly little critical attention. This book seeks to open up discussion of what we mean when we label a historical source in this way. Through a close analysis of accounts of the Second, Third and Fourth Crusades, aswell as an in-depth discussion of recent research by cognitive and social psychologists into perception and memory, this book challenges historians of the Middle Ages to revisit their often unexamined assumptions about the place of eyewitness narratives within the taxonomies of historical evidence. It is for the most part impossible to situate the authors of the texts studied here, viewed as historical actors, in precise spatial and temporal relation to the action that they purport to describe. Nor can we ever be truly certain what they actually saw. In what, therefore, does the authors' eyewitness status reside, and is this, indeed, a valid category of analysis? This book argues that the most productive way in which to approach the figure of the autoptic author is not as some floating presence close to historical events, validating our knowledge of them, but as an artefact of the text's meaning-makingoperations, in particular as these are opened up to scrutiny by narratological concepts such as the narrator, focalization and storyworld. The conclusion that emerges is that there is no single understanding of eyewitness runningthrough the texts, for all their substantive and thematic similarities; each fashions its narratorial voice in different ways as a function of its particular story-telling strategies. MARCUS BULL is Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

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A revisionist approach to Eleanor of Aquitaine and the political, social, cultural and religious world in which she lived. Eleanor of Aquitaine (1124-1204) is one of the most important and well-known figures of the Middle Ages; she exercised a huge influence on both the course of history, and on the cultural life, of the time. The essays in this collection use her as a point of entry into wider-ranging discussions of the literary, social, political and religious milieux into which she was born, and to which she contributed; they address many of the misconceptions that have grown around both Eleanor herself and the medieval Midi in general, and open up new areas of debate. Topics explored include the work of the troubadours and the importance to them of patronage; perceptions of southern France and itsinhabitants by outsiders; the early history of the Templars in southern France; cultural contacts between the Midi and other parts of the Latin world; the uses of ritual and historical myth in the expression of political power; and attitudes towards women. Contributors: Catherine Léglu, Marcus Bull, Richard W. Barber, Daniel F. Callahan, Malcolm Barber, John B. Gillingham, Linda Paterson, Ruth Harvey, Daniel Power, Laurent Macé, William Paden.

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A pioneering approach to contemporary historical writing on the First Crusade, looking at the texts as cultural artefacts rather than simply for the evidence they contain. The First Crusade (1095-1101) was the stimulus for a substantial boom in Western historical writing in the first decades of the twelfth century, beginning with the so-called "eyewitness" accounts of the crusade and extending to numerous second-hand treatments in prose and verse. From the time when many of these accounts were first assembled in printed form by Jacques Bongars in the early seventeenth century, and even more so since their collective appearance in the great nineteenth-century compendium of crusade texts, the Recueil des historiens des croisades, narrative histories have come to be regarded as the single most important resource for the academic study of the early crusade movement. But our understanding of these texts is still far from satisfactory. This ground-breaking volume draws together the work of an international team of scholars. It tackles the disjuncture between the study of the crusades and the study of medieval history-writing, setting the agenda for future research into historical narratives about or inspired by crusading. The basic premise that informs all the papers is that narrative accounts of crusades and analogous texts should not be primarily understood as repositories of data that contribute to a reconstruction of events, but as cultural artefacts that can be interrogated from a wide range of theoretical, methodological and thematic perspectives. MARCUS BULL is Andrew W Mellon Distinguished Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; DAMIEN KEMPF is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Liverpool. Contributors: Laura Ashe, Steven Biddlecombe, Marcus Bull, Peter Frankopan, Damian Kempf, James Naus, Léan Ní Chléirigh, Nicholas Paul, William J. Purkis, Luigi Russo, Jay Rubenstein, Carol Sweetenham,

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A pioneering approach to contemporary historical writing on the First Crusade, looking at the texts as cultural artefacts rather than simply for the evidence they contain. The First Crusade (1095-1101) was the stimulus for a substantial boom in Western historical writing in the first decades of the twelfth century, beginning with the so-called "eyewitness" accounts of the crusade and extending to numerous second-hand treatments in prose and verse. From the time when many of these accounts were first assembled in printed form by Jacques Bongars in the early seventeenth century, and even more so since their collective appearance in the great nineteenth-century compendium of crusade texts, the Recueil des historiens des croisades, narrative histories have come to be regarded as the single most important resource for the academic study of the early crusade movement. But our understanding of these texts is still far from satisfactory. This ground-breaking volume draws together the work of an international team of scholars. It tackles the disjuncture between the study of the crusades and the study of medieval history-writing, setting the agenda for future research into historical narratives about or inspired by crusading. The basic premise that informs all the papers is that narrative accounts of crusades and analogous texts should not be primarily understood as repositories of data that contribute to a reconstruction of events, but as cultural artefacts that can be interrogated from a wide range of theoretical, methodological and thematic perspectives. MARCUS BULL is Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; DAMIEN KEMPF is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Liverpool. Contributors: Laura Ashe, Steven Biddlecombe, Marcus Bull, Peter Frankopan, Damian Kempf, James Naus, Léan Ní Chléirigh, Nicholas Paul, William J. Purkis, Luigi Russo, Jay Rubenstein, Carol Sweetenham,

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