Towards Jerusalem! Evoking Space and Travel in Middle Latin, Old French and Middle High German Crusade Songs

Abstract

The mental evocation of the earthly Jerusalem is an integral part of medieval religious practice. Through prayer and meditation techniques that involve imagining oneself at the site of Christ’s passion; through architectural replicas of the via dolorosa; and through the connection of local spatial structures with the topography of the Jerusalem of the Gospels, the holy city gains for medieval Christians a presence that is immediately experienced and only secondarily based on real landmarks, being instead grounded in salvation history and its associated spatial structures. The evocation of Jerusalem in crusade poetry works in exactly the opposite way, implying not the mental transfer of the distant city into the here and now, but a factual journey to the Orient and the physical transfer of the believer to a geographically concrete city, while also seeking to make it imaginatively experienceable. Staged as a place that is both real and literary, Jerusalem draws its meaning from the same frame of reference as the imagined city known from religious practice. Against this background, this article examines songs from the context of the Fifth Crusade to determine how the intertwining of the mentally familiar place of worship and the concretely evoked, unfamiliar geographical Jerusalem can be observed in topographical strategies, and how the imagined movement in concrete space is lyrically evoked.