BOB2020MOME

This book offers a way of reading maps of the Holy Land as visual imagery with religious connotations. Through a corpus of representative examples created between the sixth and the nineteenth centuries, it studies the maps as iconic imagery of an iconic landscape and analyses their strategies to manifest the spiritual quality of the biblical topography, to support religious tenets, and to construct and preserve cultural memory.

Maps of the Holy Land have thus far been studied with methodologies such as cartography and historical geography, while the main question addressed was the reliability of the maps as cartographic documents. Through another perspective and using the methodology of visual studies, this book reveals that maps of the Holy Land constructed religious messages and were significant instruments through which different Christian cultures (Byzantine, Catholic, Protestant, and Greek Orthodox) shaped their religious identities. It does not seek to ascertain how the maps delivered geographical information, but rather how they utilized the geographical information in formulating religious and cultural values.

Through its examination of maps of the Holy Land, this book thus explores both Christian visual culture and Christian spirituality throughout the centuries.

The Crown and the Cross examines the heretofore-unstudied role of the French province of Burgundy in the ‘traditional’ era of the crusades, from 1095-c.1220. Covering the First, Second, Third, Fourth, and Albigensian Crusades in detail, it focuses primarily on the Capetian dukes, a cadet branch of the French royal family, but uncovers substantial lay participation and some crusading traditions among Burgundian noble families as well. The book additionally uses the crusading institution to explore the development of the medieval French monarchy, and makes accessible a corpus of scholarship and documents that until now have mostly existed in French or Latin. It concludes that while piety and religion did play a central role in the experience of many everyday Burgundian crusaders, the greater political ramifications of the crusading project functioned in subtle and long-lasting ways, and had consequences for the entire institution, not just Burgundy or France. Of interest to scholars of the crusades, French history, and the formation of medieval Europe, The Crown and the Cross nuances, challenges, and expands our understanding of the intellectual genealogy of the crusades and their real-world consequences, fills a critical gap in the historiography, and poses a set of important conclusions and questions for continued study.