Search results for ""author carol sweetenham""

The First Crusade was arguably one of the most significant events of the Middle Ages. It was the only event to generate its own epic cycle, the Old French Crusade Cycle. The central trilogy at the heart of the Cycle describes the Crusade from its beginnings to the climactic battle of Ascalon, comprising the Chanson d’Antioche, the Chanson des Chétifs and the Chanson de Jérusalem. This translation of the Chétifs and the Jérusalem accompanies and completes the translation of the Antioche and makes the trilogy available to English readers in its entirety for the first time. The value of the trilogy lies above all in the insight it gives us to medieval perceptions of the Crusade. The events are portrayed as part of a divine plan where even outcasts and captives can achieve salvation through Crusade. This in turn underlies the value of the Cycle as a recruiting and propaganda tool. The trilogy gives a window onto the chivalric preoccupations of thirteenth-century France, exploring concerns about status, heroism and defeat. It portrays the material realities of the era in vivid detail: the minutiae of combat, smoke-filled halls, feasts, prisons and more. And the two newly translated poems are highly entertaining as well, featuring a lubricious Saracen lady not in the first flush of youth, a dragon inhabited by a devil, marauding monkeys, miracles and much more. The historian will find little new about the Crusade itself, but abundant material on how it was perceived, portrayed and performed. The translation is accompanied by an introduction examining the origins of the two poems and their wider place in the cycle. It is supported by extensive footnotes, a comprehensive index of names and places and translations of the main variants.

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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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