Project Goals:
This pedagogical project aims to ask students to consider in a broad, flexible manner the question of how the crusades influenced the evolution and development of culture during the Middle Ages. Through this project, students will gain experience thinking critically about cultural, particularly literary, production during and responses to the crusades. In order to achieve these broad goals, students will learn to productively engage in the study of material objects within a literary setting and to think critically about the medieval construction of identity and meaning through the complex networks created by material objects within narrative sources. To the extent that narrative materials reflect historical realities, this project will open students to new ways of thinking about the social function of material objects beyond the bounds of literary sources and outside the field of medieval studies.
This pedagogical project aims to ask students to consider in a broad, flexible manner the question of how the crusades influenced the evolution and development of culture during the Middle Ages. Through this project, students will gain experience thinking critically about cultural, particularly literary, production during and responses to the crusades. In order to achieve these broad goals, students will learn to productively engage in the study of material objects within a literary setting and to think critically about the medieval construction of identity and meaning through the complex networks created by material objects within narrative sources. To the extent that narrative materials reflect historical realities, this project will open students to new ways of thinking about the social function of material objects beyond the bounds of literary sources and outside the field of medieval studies.
The Project:
In this project, students will be asked to read and work with a medieval narrative source, whether historical or literary, that features themes, motifs, imagery, etc. that bear some relationship to the medieval crusades. During the reading of this text, students will select a material object that appears in the work. Then the students will identify characters, historical figures, geographical locations, and ideas that are specifically mentioned within the text as bearing some relationship to the originally selected object. Having created a list of words associated with the originally chosen object, the students will then be asked to plot them visually, creating a diagram of the relationship between all these words as they perceive them to be generated by the text. This diagram can take any form: a network diagram, a time line, flow chart, etc. The form of the visualization is really up to how the student interprets these relationships. If the relationships are geographical, a map might work best. If diachronic, a time line or genealogical stemma might be most suitable. Finally, the students will gloss their visualization in one to two sentences for each of the individual relationships they see.
Here is an example of one type of visualization the students might choose:
In this project, students will be asked to read and work with a medieval narrative source, whether historical or literary, that features themes, motifs, imagery, etc. that bear some relationship to the medieval crusades. During the reading of this text, students will select a material object that appears in the work. Then the students will identify characters, historical figures, geographical locations, and ideas that are specifically mentioned within the text as bearing some relationship to the originally selected object. Having created a list of words associated with the originally chosen object, the students will then be asked to plot them visually, creating a diagram of the relationship between all these words as they perceive them to be generated by the text. This diagram can take any form: a network diagram, a time line, flow chart, etc. The form of the visualization is really up to how the student interprets these relationships. If the relationships are geographical, a map might work best. If diachronic, a time line or genealogical stemma might be most suitable. Finally, the students will gloss their visualization in one to two sentences for each of the individual relationships they see.
Here is an example of one type of visualization the students might choose:
Depending on the needs of the students or the professor, the project can end at this point. However, more a more advanced project, students can be asked to produce a in depth analysis of no more than two to three pages detailing one or two elements in the network of relationships they have identified.
Taking the Project Further:
This style of project works particularly well with narrative texts that progress in an episodic manner, as each episode will be a relatively self-contained package which will not require the student to scan a whole major work. The example above is derived from the “Epitaph for Geoffrey II of Joinville” which can be read in conjunction with John of Joinville’s “The Life of Saint Louis.” Joinville’s work, completed in the early fourteenth century, chronicles the life of Saint Louis and his own participation in the seventh crusade. His text is particularly suited to this project, as his episodic narrative and granular interest in the crusading world features many rich object choices within small chunks of text, rendering it both a flexible and digestible text for even students new to medieval studies.
More advanced students, or those students in classes with a literary focus, might benefit more from charting these same networks over a sustained reading of a larger work, with the aim of producing a final seminar paper on these relationships. For this more advanced approach, I would strongly suggest working with the Estoire del Saint Graal and the Queste del Saint Graal, two parts of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, which are available in English translation. The Queste prominently features material objects, whose spiritual reality are then explained through sustained moments of exegesis. The Queste thus features a vast cast of materials that are then given a prehistory through the Estoire. Both texts were composed in the major crusading region of Champagne and feature crusading imagery and motifs.
This style of project works particularly well with narrative texts that progress in an episodic manner, as each episode will be a relatively self-contained package which will not require the student to scan a whole major work. The example above is derived from the “Epitaph for Geoffrey II of Joinville” which can be read in conjunction with John of Joinville’s “The Life of Saint Louis.” Joinville’s work, completed in the early fourteenth century, chronicles the life of Saint Louis and his own participation in the seventh crusade. His text is particularly suited to this project, as his episodic narrative and granular interest in the crusading world features many rich object choices within small chunks of text, rendering it both a flexible and digestible text for even students new to medieval studies.
More advanced students, or those students in classes with a literary focus, might benefit more from charting these same networks over a sustained reading of a larger work, with the aim of producing a final seminar paper on these relationships. For this more advanced approach, I would strongly suggest working with the Estoire del Saint Graal and the Queste del Saint Graal, two parts of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, which are available in English translation. The Queste prominently features material objects, whose spiritual reality are then explained through sustained moments of exegesis. The Queste thus features a vast cast of materials that are then given a prehistory through the Estoire. Both texts were composed in the major crusading region of Champagne and feature crusading imagery and motifs.
Project Summary:
- Choose object in a narrative source
- Create a visual diagram of related objects, people, etc.
- Gloss the relationships between these objects, explaining in no more than a sentence or two the nature of the relationship
- This visualization could then be presented in class or students can be asked to develop a small descriptive paper about the nature of the relationships they have identified. This visualization can also be developed into a final paper project, in which the student produces a thesis driven seminar paper assessing the sum effect of these relationships.
Suggested Primary Source Texts:
Norris J. Lacy, ed. and E. Jane Burns, trans., The Quest for the Holy Grail (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010).
——, The History of the Holy Grail (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer: 2010).
Caroline Smith, ed. & trans., Joinville and Villehardouin: Chronicles of the Crusades (London: Penguin, 2008).
Suggested Secondary Source Texts on Materiality and Material Culture:
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
Anne Lester, “What Remains: Women, Relics and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade,” Journal of Medieval History 40, no. 3 (2014), 311-328.
——, “Remembrance of Things Past: Memory and Material Objects in the Time of the Crusades, 1095-1291,” in Remembering the Crusades and Crusading (London and New York: Routledge, 2016).
Nicholas Paul, “The Fabric of Victory,” in To Follow in Their Footsteps: The Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages (Ithaca, 2012).