Megan Cassidy-Welch

Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination, c. 1150-1400

This book explores the world of religious thinking on imprisonment, and how images of imprisonment were used in monastic thought, the cult of saints, the early inquisitions, preaching and hagiographical literature and the world of the crusades to describe a conception of inclusion and freedom that was especially meaningful to medieval Christians.

Prison and sacrament in the cult of saints: images of St Barbara in late medieval art

This article analyses the changing visual representation of St Barbara during the later middle ages. The article identifies a shift in St Barbaras iconography: whereas earlier medieval representations of the saint almost always show her with her prison tower, a number of fifteenth-century representations show the saint holding a chalice and host. The article traces how and why this shift occurred. In particular, the article explores the ways in which medieval thinking linking incarceration and liberation were integrated into new representations of St Barbara to stress her intercessionary, sacramental functions. Overall, the article argues that the visual transformation of St Barbaras prison tower into a liturgical vessel reveals how saints like Barbara were increasingly viewed as conduits to the inclusive sort of freedom that participation in Christianitys sacramental economy invited.

Memory and interpretation: new approaches to the study of the crusades

This article describes the connection between studies of memory and the history of the crusades. The authors argue that integrating memory into crusades scholarship offers new ways of exploring the aftermath of war, the construction of cultural memory, the role of women and families in this process, and the crusading movement itself. The article draws on and extends recent trends in crusade scholarship that understand the crusades as a broad religious movement that called upon and developed within a cultural framework that was wider than previously acknowledged. It examines the historical and theoretical development of memory studies and then outlines the recent historiography of crusading studies. The article then introduces a series of essays, which together examine the creation, communication and dissemination of crusade memory.

Remembering the Crusades and crusading

Remembering the Crusades and Crusading examines the diverse contexts in which crusading was memorialised and commemorated in the medieval world and beyond. The collection not only shows how the crusades were commemorated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but also considers the longer-term remembrance of the crusades into the modern era. This collection is divided into three sections, the first of which deals with the textual, material and visual sources used to remember. Each contributor introduces a particular body of source material and presents case studies using those sources in their own research. The second section contains four chapters examining specific communities active in commemorating the crusades, including religious communities, family groups and royal courts. Finally, the third section examines the cultural memory of crusading in the Byzantine, Iberian and Baltic regions beyond the early years, as well as the trajectory of crusading memory in the Muslim Middle East. This book draws together and extends the current debates in the history of the crusades and the history of memory and in so doing offers a fresh synthesis of material in both fields. It will be essential reading for students of the crusades and memory.

‘O Damietta’: war memory and crusade in thirteenth-century Egypt

The Egyptian port city of Damietta was a place which occupied a brief but important position in the crusading imaginary of the thirteenth century. This article examines how this city was used both to communicate particular memories of war experience and to lay down future patterns of remembrance. Processes of eyewitnessing, establishing the wider meaning of war, creating a warrior tradition and affirming the value of location or place were all ways in which war memory was articulated during the crusading period. Through an exploration of crusader encounters with the city of Damietta, this article offers some new insights into the nature and importance of medieval memory and remembrance of war.

Before trauma: the crusades, medieval memory and violence

Abstract Can ‘trauma’ be an appropriate or insightful category of historical analysis for the study of the medieval past? In this article I consider how trauma theory can expose links between representation, memory and violence during the period of the crusades. I focus on one case study of ‘collective trauma’ – the capture of a relic of the True Cross by the army of Saladin at the battle of Hattin in 1187. According to Christian commentators, the battle of Hattin was particularly brutal and its effects were long-lasting. Yet it was not the battle itself that was recorded by western commentators as particularly damaging. Rather, it was the capture during the battle of a piece of the True Cross, one of the holy land’s most precious relics, that was recorded by eyewitnesses, later chroniclers, artists and preachers as the most shattering aspect of this event. This article considers the loss of the True Cross as a moment of significant ontological rupture for the Christians of the west. I suggest that the relationship between individual experience and collective identifications that lay at the heart of crusading culture can be illuminated by paying attention to contemporaneous theories of cognition, memory, experience and suffering. In so doing I am asking how past peoples tried subjectively and collectively to make sense of devastating experiences and how modern historians of the Middle Ages might usefully integrate trauma theory into historical method.

The Monastery of São Vicente de Fora in Lisbon as a Site of Crusading Memory

By the early thirteenth century, the monastery of Sao Vicente de Fora in Lisbon was a small but significant site of crusading memory. The site was particularly meaningful to German and Flemish crusaders, a contingent of whom had participated in the siege of Lisbon during the Second Crusade, and who retained links with the monastery from that time onwards. Through an examination of the texts produced by and about Sao Vicente de Fora, this article traces how the monastery established and promoted itself as place uniquely associated with remembering the crusades.

The Stedinger Crusade: War, Remembrance, and Absence in Thirteenth-Century Germany

This article explores the creation and communication of memory during and immediately after the Stedinger crusade (1232-1234). Remembrance of the crusade is shown to be manifested in the creation of special memorial liturgies, in the foundation and patronage of local monasteries around Bremen and in the writing of chronicles and annals in northern Germany and Friesland. The article illuminates the complex relationships between local powerbrokers and peasant farmers, and demonstrates how the category of “holy war” was used to support the colonization of Stedinger land. The article also argues that control of the memory of this crusade was an important act of legitimizing the war against the Stedinger farmers. This article thus reveals both the possibilities and limitations of investigating the difficult and various processes of war memorialization in the thirteenth century.

Prison Miracles and the Cult of Saints

The month of May was a busy time in the Bavarian town of Inchenhofen, when during the warm southern German spring the volume of pilgrim traffic to the small Markt increased. The source of the pilgrims’ interest was a shrine to St Leonard of Noblac, a French saint, whose cult had spread to Bavaria and become firmly entrenched in the market economy and spiritual landscape of the region since the late thirteenth century1 Leonard was a general thaumaturge — he healed the sick and cured the mad; he rescued small children from drowning; he assisted women who endured suffering during childbirth. But by far the most frequent miracle performed by this most active saint was the liberation of prisoners from captivity. Men and women alike arrived at Inchenhofen to narrate their escapes from various situations of imprisonment after invoking St Leonard, some still wearing the chains that had shackled them to the walls of dank dungeons and impenetrable towers. Others brought votive offerings — wax or iron representations of chains and fetters, models of limbs which had been bound and were now released, and even microcosmic replicas of the towers which had served as their prisons. These objects were donated to the shrine as mementos of prison experiences and thankful testimony to the wondrous workings of the saint. St Leonard was not the only saint to be associated with imprisonment during the medieval period.

Imprisonment, Memory and Space in the Early Inquisitions

In the previous two chapters I have explored ideas of imprisonment in the context of medieval monastic and lay piety to argue that in both milieux there are clear connections between imprisonment and liberation. In monastic writings, confinement of the body and freedom of the spirit are two important strands of the discourse of monastic enclosure; while in the cult of saints, prisoners could partake of the corporeal and spiritual freedom offered by St Leonard by including themselves in a sacred and contractual economy of petition and pilgrimage. In this chapter I turn to a rather different religious context: the context of the thirteenth and early fourteenth-century inquisitio heretice pravitatis in southern France. The early inquisitions are useful for exploring ideas of imprisonment for two preliminary reasons. Ideas of imprisonment were used to describe the character of heretical belief and activity, and its terrible effect on Christian souls. Imprisonment was also a central tool of discipline and punishment for the inquisitors. The procedural deployment of imprisonment was very much bound up with the generation of testimonial truth and useful information, as James Given has shown, and the inquisitorial prison was a highly productive carceral space carefully and deliberately manufactured as a place to inspire revelation through fear.1