| Traditionally, a study of crusading literature has always taken the approach of setting "east" against "west," a model which presents the crusades as a fragmented series of events, and a methodology which ultimately provides a fractional study of the textual traditions at hand. This dissertation project, which explores representations of the city of Jerusalem during the period of the early crusades in the Arabic, Armenian, French, and English traditions, breaks away from a compartmentalized study of crusading literature, by considering source material, in their original languages, as analogous and comparable. By placing texts which might not have had any literary contact alongside one another, this study offers a transnational and intercultural approach to the study of the crusades. Moreover, in its inclusion of material in the Arabic and Armenian traditions, this dissertation moves away from previous trends in the scholarship of the crusades, which have not only focused primarily on sources from Western Europe, but have also ignored and oftentimes discredited the materials from the east. As such, this project both broadens our understandings of the crusading period and the city of Jerusalem through its analyses of literature and urban space within the theological, historical, and literary framework of a number of traditions.;Positioning itself around the axis of the two major battles over the city of Jerusalem (1097 and 1187) this dissertation devotes two chapters to each of these events, offering an eastern and western perspective respectively. The dissertation argues that each of these perspectives produces a textual image of the city of Jerusalem in their narratives, named as the envisaged, which embodies the social, cultural, and religious attitudes towards Jerusalem present within each of these respective traditions. However, this dissertation further suggests that the approach and modes of representing Jerusalem are in fact shared among these variant accounts---each one of these narratives considers Jerusalem as a sacred, physical, and disputed space which they must redeem from the enemy. I respectively name these categories as the sacrosanct, the geo-topographical, and the contested and discuss their appearance within each of the literary and historiographic traditions at hand. |
