CITYFALL · The Fall of Acre and the Lamentation of Biblical and Ancient Cities in Medieval Literature and Historiography.
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-10-01 → 2024-03-31
- EU contribution
- €203,149
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
The Fall of Acre and the Lamentation of Biblical and Ancient Cities in Medieval Literature and Historiography.
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
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The fall of a city captivates the imagination, provokes intense emotional reactions and is often used to draw a line in historical narratives. The global attention and media coverage which the destruction of Mosul, Aleppo, or Palmyra have attracted during the ongoing war in Syria demonstrates the continuing power of the motif. Since antiquity the fall of cities has been lamented in different genres of writing and used to create historiographical thresholds. Prominent examples include biblical cities such as Jericho, Babylon or Jerusalem and ancient cities such as Troy, Carthage or Rome. This project aims to understand the role these ancient and biblical narratives played in the shaping of medieval political and cultural identities across transalpine Europe, reassessing the underestimated yet crucial role these biblical and ancient narratives played as they migrated into medieval Europe. Despite an increased interest in city laments in recent scholarship these studies remain mostly anchored in their original ancient or mediterranean contexts. The reception of these traditions in Western and Central Europe and most importantly the German lands remains unexplored, despite the fact that for over a thousand years, recourse to fallen cities provided the most inuential foil for narratives of political authority and legitimacy and also to make sense of present political occurrences such as the re-conquest of the city of Acre – the last outpost of the crusaders in the Eastern Mediterranen – to the Mamluks in 1291.Using the fall of Acre as a medieval starting point I will take a synchronous and daichronous look at medieval texts written between late 11th and the early 14th century to examine 1) which ancient textual traditions of lament were available for medieval writers 2) how were they used to make sense of the present by re-purposing the past and 3) how medieval identities were constructed and contemporary concerns of political and cultural belonging negotiated.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITAET BERN · BernCoordinatorSwitzerland
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union