220093 New Views of the European Crusades to the Middle East (S) (SoSe 2016)

Up until the 1960s, most people thought they knew about the crusades. The most common explanation of these movements was that they exported surplus and troublesome young men away from Europe. Despite the seminal work of scholars like Carl Erdmann (Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens, 1935), the crusades were often seen as a topic mostly of interest to military historians and peripheral to the experience of most people in Europe in the Middle Ages. Beginning in the 1970s, however, historians began to question older assumptions about the meaning of the crusades, taking religious motivations very seriously, and examining, among other topics, how medieval people understood crusading, crusade preaching and law, how crusades were organized and financed, how crusades looked to those crusaded against, and relations between the peoples living together in the crusader kingdoms. The literature in this field is expanding exponentially, and we will certainly not be able to read everything that might be of interest (in fact, we will concentrate on crusades to the Middle East before the fall of Acre in 1291), but in this seminar, we will examine some of the most recent anglophone literature on the crusades, emblematic of many of these new directions, as well as a few older seminal works, and will discuss the possibilities and limitations of the primary source evidence for further research. Students will write a research paper on a topic of their choosing relating to a particular crusade topic, which will include an analysis of at least one major primary source or type of source. This seminar is taught in the English language. It is therefore an ideal opportunity to practice one’s English in an academic environment. International students are very welcome.

Requirements for participation, required level

Students need to be prepared to read and discuss the relevant secondary literature in English. Research papers may be written in English or German

Bibliography

· Norman Housley, Contesting the Crusades (Hoboken: Wiley, 2006).
· Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders, 1095-1131. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
· Paul M. Cobb, The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford: Clarendon, 2014)
· Conor Kostick, ed. The Crusades and the Near East: Cultural Histories (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010)
· Nicholas Paul, To Follow in Their Footsteps: The Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012)
· Christoph T. Maier, Crusade Propaganda and Ideology: Model Sermons for the Preaching of the Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).