M. Cecilia Gaposchkin

THE PLACE OF JERUSALEM IN WESTERN CRUSADING RITES OF DEPARTURE (1095-1300)

Crusaders underwent a liturgical rite of departure that was built upon the rite for departing pilgrims in which a cross blessing was added to the blessing of scrip and staff. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the symbolism of the cross and the meaning of the rite were developing and fluid, but became increasingly associated with Jerusalem pilgrimage and Jerusalem crusade. In turn, the evocation of Jerusalem was increasingly associated with the physical and obtainable place of Christ’s life (rather than the eschatological Jerusalem of the salvific future). The rite also reflected developing values of crusading spirituality.

The King of France and the Queen of Heaven: The Iconography of the Porte Rouge of Notre-Dame of Paris

The Porte Rouge (ca. 1270) on the north flank of Notre-Dame in Paris depicts a king and queen kneeling before an image of the Coronation of the Virgin. These figures have traditionally been identified as donor portraits of Louis IX and his wife Marguerite of Provence. The royal pair never were patrons of the cathedral, however, preferring friars and monks to the secular church in their endowments and shunning a long tradition of Capetian support of Notre-Dame. Suffering from the resulting loss of prestige, the cathedral canons sought to appropriate the image of royal authority within their own ecclesiology and depicted the king in supplication to the Virgin Mary, whose image symbolized the church. In 1270 the kneeling praying figures we have come to identify as donor figures did not convey financial patronage of specific works of art, but rather spiritual supplication and entreaty. By showing the king and queen in a ritual gesture of supplication to Maria-Ecclesia, the portal expressed the churchs ideal of the king subordinate and supplicant to the triumphant cathedral. Furthermore, in the image of the king the portal denies any likeness to the figure of Christ, rejecting the contemporary, but competing ideal articulated by the crown during Louiss reign of a sacral and christological kingship independent of the church. Rather than simply representing a reductive coronation iconography, the Porte Rouge offers a bold and deft statement of ecclesiastical authority and ideology of the second half of the thirteenth century.

The echoes of victory: liturgical and para-liturgical commemorations of the capture of Jerusalem in the West

The capture of Jerusalem by the Franks on 15 July 1099 was commemorated liturgically in several monastic and secular communities in France. Inscribing the events of 1099 into the liturgy was a principal mechanism of making memory. Commemoration occurred in a number of different ways, from simple notation in liturgical calendars, to para-liturgical compositions that celebrated crusader victories, to formal liturgical commemoration included in the Sanctorale. The methods and texts of liturgical commemoration celebrated the victory in a variety of ideological registers. As a group, the commemorations placed the event within providential history, inherently sacralising and legitimising the capture of Jerusalem and thus the whole of the First Crusade.