England's quest for Jerusalem:  Fourteenth-century literature of crusade and pilgrimage.
Published: 2004
Language: eng
Number of pages: 361
Description: The role of Jerusalem was essential to both the internal and external exercise of pilgrimage and crusade. In the fourth chapter, I suggest that  The Book of Sir John Mandeville presents the city of Jerusalem as a full-scale mnemonic representation of Christian teaching. The presentation of Jerusalem in The Book of Sir John Mandeville, along with that found in the previous texts, suggests that external crusade and pilgrimage had turned inward, moving from a communal exercise to an individual quest for personal morality. The final chapter illustrates the transition from exterior to interior devotion in medieval thinking about Jerusalem and the role of this movement in the formation of national identity. Here, I explore the literary image of the crusader who would fight and die for an actual or a mystical homeland in Bernard of Clairvaux's works, Middle English translations of Guillaume de Deguileville's poetry, and the Anglo-Norman Livre de seyntz medicines . In these works, England comes to be seen as the new Promised Land. In this way, the work of pilgrimage and crusade, as well as the image of Jerusalem itself, were not only spiritualized but also harnessed in the service of the nation.English literature about pilgrimage and crusade was written by and for people who defined themselves both as a religious community and as a nation in competition with older, more firmly established European kingdoms. These discourses of national English identity and Christian identity were separate yet intertwined: in particular, late medieval writing about Jerusalem expresses concerns about national morality and prestige based on England's relationship to the holy city. In "England's Quest," I address how a series of English writers attempted to take figurative control of the Holy Land in the literary past, present, and future, making it an explicitly English domain.This dissertation begins by exploring the textual reality of Jerusalem in three English itineraries: the anonymous Itinerarium cuiusdam Anglici , William Wey's Itineraries, and the Diarie of Englysshe Travell by Sir Richard Torkington. The following chapters, two and three, consider portrayals of Jerusalem in the romances, focusing especially on how these accounts creatively retell historical events in order to establish England's ties to the holy city. These two chapters examine the romances of Richard, Coer de Lion (sic) and The Siege of Jerusalem, both of which illustrate the medieval Christian belief that the habitation of Jerusalem by Jewish and Muslim citizens corresponded to the besieged Christian soul, constantly threatened by sin. Here, literary images which had once been designed to foment actual pilgrimage and crusade take on a new role, encouraging these exercises to be performed not actually, but affectively.
Notes: Adviser:  Suzanne Conklin Akbari.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2004.

includes bibliographical references.

Electronic version licensed for access by U. of T. users.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-10, Section: A, page: 3797.