Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CITYFALL (The Fall of Acre and the Lamentation of Biblical and Ancient Cities in Medieval Literature and Historiography.)
Reporting period: 2021-10-01 to 2023-09-30
The objective of CITYFALL was to understand how medieval authors used biblical and ancient traditions lamenting the falls of cities in their own texts to create the political and cultural identities of the high and later Middle Ages and to negotiate current events by contextualising them in these ancient and biblical traditions. This objective was achieved by pursuing three aims:
Aim 1 was to track the process of transformation, in which traditions negotiating collective trauma and cultural loss are reshaped into political narratives which could serve as foundational myths for medieval European polities like the German Empire.
Aim 2 was to show how medieval authors lamenting fallen cities in medieval texts claim their heritage and make their historical prestige and authority available for the communities they are writing for. With this, new identities can be constructed and contemporary concerns of political and cultural belonging can be negotiated.
Aim 3 was to gain a better understanding how medieval authors responded to their audiences need for guidance in the face of historical occurrence they could not bring in line with the cultural axioms of their worldview and how biblical and ancient narrative models helped to reconcile the expectations shaped by these axioms with their evident suspension by historical occurrence. T
Aim 1 was to track the process of transformation, in which traditions negotiating collective trauma and cultural loss are reshaped into political narratives which could serve as foundational myths for medieval European polities like the German Empire.
Aim 2 was to show how medieval authors lamenting fallen cities in medieval texts claim their heritage and make their historical prestige and authority available for the communities they are writing for. With this, new identities can be constructed and contemporary concerns of political and cultural belonging can be negotiated.
Aim 3 was to gain a better understanding how medieval authors responded to their audiences need for guidance in the face of historical occurrence they could not bring in line with the cultural axioms of their worldview and how biblical and ancient narrative models helped to reconcile the expectations shaped by these axioms with their evident suspension by historical occurrence. T
CITYFALL has pushed the study of the medieval city lament beyond their usual disciplinary confines, combined perspectives and methods from different subjects, and shed light on the workings of literary and historiographical lamentation. By not limiting the scope of research to texts belonging to a certain genre, type or language, but rather by filtering the sources depending on whether they participated in the discourse form of the city lament and if they referred to the event of the capture of Acre by the Egyptian Mamluks in 1291 or not, CITYFALL eschewed the limitations of traditional disciplinary perspectives and provided a scholarly template of how to conduct truly interdisciplinary research in Medieval Studies. Some texts were for the first time understood and described in their quality as a city lament. Other texts were for the first time compared and related to the event which ties them together. Thus CITYFALL has spun a dense web of insights into how the capture of Acre in 1291 was perceived across medieval Europe and the Mediterranean and how this perception informed cultural expressions of loss and lament in these regions. CITYFALL has conclusively demonstrated the following key results regarding the study of the medieval city lament.
1) Compared to the classical tradition the biblical tradition is clearly the stronger source for medieval city laments. The classical tradition has some influence on the structure of the medieval city lament, in particular via the rhetorical urbs capta-template, but on the level of comparative discourse reference is made routinely to biblical cities like Jericho, Sodom, Gomorra, Babylon and most importantly Jerusalem. Reference to cities from the classical tradition like Troy or Carthage is scarce. Rome features somewhat more prominently, but mostly in late Antiquity, less so in the Middle Ages.
2) After 1291 the medieval city lament is not just developed in the Latin West. Other Mediterranean communities, in particular the Jews in Southern Spain and in Egypt, were also affected and in their cultural output participated in the discursive form of the city lament. While they do share points of concern and irritation with the texts from the Latin West they are literarily rooted in a different traditions and part of a different story, which unfolds in much closer dialogue with the Hebrew Bible and the poetic traditions of the Arab World, in particular of Andalusia.
3) Authors writing not in Latin but in European vernaculars, such as Old French or Middle High German, who might or might not have had knowledge of Latin, were an important, if not driving factor of the development of the city lament across Europe. They provided access for vernacular communities to an important cultural coping mechanism, while they, at the same time, enabled the discourse form of the city lament to circulate more widely beyond its Romance and Latin contexts of origin in the Mediterranean and reach more remote parts of Europe, such as the German lands, the Netherlands, and even the Baltics.
4) The city lament cross-fertilised with other forms of discourse, which had been dormant across the Latin West, in part since the mid-12th century, which led to a mutual amplification. It brought back eschatology as a cultural horizon for historiography and literature and marked the beginning of a highly nuanced and problem-aware engagement with the underpinnings, failings, limitations, and complications of the crusading movements, in the form of the so-called recuperatio terrae sanctae literature which would last well into the 14th century.
1) Compared to the classical tradition the biblical tradition is clearly the stronger source for medieval city laments. The classical tradition has some influence on the structure of the medieval city lament, in particular via the rhetorical urbs capta-template, but on the level of comparative discourse reference is made routinely to biblical cities like Jericho, Sodom, Gomorra, Babylon and most importantly Jerusalem. Reference to cities from the classical tradition like Troy or Carthage is scarce. Rome features somewhat more prominently, but mostly in late Antiquity, less so in the Middle Ages.
2) After 1291 the medieval city lament is not just developed in the Latin West. Other Mediterranean communities, in particular the Jews in Southern Spain and in Egypt, were also affected and in their cultural output participated in the discursive form of the city lament. While they do share points of concern and irritation with the texts from the Latin West they are literarily rooted in a different traditions and part of a different story, which unfolds in much closer dialogue with the Hebrew Bible and the poetic traditions of the Arab World, in particular of Andalusia.
3) Authors writing not in Latin but in European vernaculars, such as Old French or Middle High German, who might or might not have had knowledge of Latin, were an important, if not driving factor of the development of the city lament across Europe. They provided access for vernacular communities to an important cultural coping mechanism, while they, at the same time, enabled the discourse form of the city lament to circulate more widely beyond its Romance and Latin contexts of origin in the Mediterranean and reach more remote parts of Europe, such as the German lands, the Netherlands, and even the Baltics.
4) The city lament cross-fertilised with other forms of discourse, which had been dormant across the Latin West, in part since the mid-12th century, which led to a mutual amplification. It brought back eschatology as a cultural horizon for historiography and literature and marked the beginning of a highly nuanced and problem-aware engagement with the underpinnings, failings, limitations, and complications of the crusading movements, in the form of the so-called recuperatio terrae sanctae literature which would last well into the 14th century.
The impact of CITYFALL goes beyond the academic exploitations of the action's research results. In the current global poly-crisis the results of CITYFALL have wide-ranging implications. Ours is a society that is deeply convinced to stand at the centre of the order of the world. It shares this with the Latin-Christian society of Europe during the Middle Ages. They were convinced that their cause in the Levant was divine-ordained and therefore had to be successful. When Acre was captured and the crusades failed this shook the axioms of the Latin-Christian world-view to the core. Like these medieval Europeans contemporary Europeans have recently been faced with incisive events which challenged their unquestioned convictions: the Covid 19 pandemic, the alienation of the Global South, the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. Understanding the patterns which societies have followed in the past, when they to cope with shock and crisis, and the city lament is one of those fundamental coping mechanisms, will increase the understanding of our own reactions to similar events in our time and help to develop a greater resilience as civil, liberal, and democratic societies.