Liturgical Devotions in Crusader States

The Crusades remain a topic of perpetual interest, and almost equally perpetual misrepresentation in the hands of many. One area that has been opening up has been the study of ritual and liturgy in the Crusader states, treated by emerging scholars, including Daniel Galadza in his Liturgy and Byzantinization in Jerusalem.

Galadza is one of the contributors to a new scholarly collection entitled Liturgy and Devotion in the Crusader States, eds. Iris Shagrir and Cecilia Gaposchkin (Routledge, 2018), 150 pages.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Examining liturgy as historical evidence has, in recent years, developed into a flourishing field of research. The chapters in this volume offer innovative discussion of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem from the perspective of 'liturgy in history'. They demonstrate how the total liturgical experience, which was visual, emotional, motile, olfactory, and aural, can be analysed to understand the messages that liturgy was intended to convey. The chapters reveal how combining narrative sources with liturgical documents can help decode political circumstances and inter-group relations and decipher the core ideals of the community of Outremer. Moreover, understanding the Latins’ liturgical activities in the Holy Land has much to contribute to our understanding of the crusade as an institution, how crusade spirituality was practised on the ground in the Latin East, and how people engaged with the crusading movement.

This volume brings together eight original studies, forwarded by the editors’ introduction, on the liturgy of Jerusalem, spanning the immediate pre-Crusade and Crusade period (11th-13th centuries). It demonstrates the richness of a focus on the liturgy in illuminating the social, religious, and intellectual history of this critical period of ecclesiastical self-assertion, as well as conceptions of the sacred in this time and place.

We are also given the table of contents:

1. Liturgy and devotion in the crusader states: introduction (Iris Shagrir and Cecilia Gaposchkin)

2. The regular canons and the liturgy of the Latin East (Wolf Zöller)

3. The libelli of Lucca, Biblioteca Arcivescovile, MS 5: liturgy from the siege of Acre? (Cara Aspesi)

4. Rewriting the Latin liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre: text, ritual and devotion for 1149 (Sebastián Salvadó)

5. Greek liturgy in crusader Jerusalem: witnesses of liturgical life at the Holy Sepulchre and St Sabas Lavra (Daniel Galadza)

6. Greek Orthodox monasteries in the Holy Land and their liturgies in the period of the crusades (Andrew Jotischky)

7. Processing together, celebrating apart: shared processions in the Latin East (Christopher MacEvitt)

8. Holy Fire and sacral kingship in post-conquest Jerusalem (Jay Rubenstein)

9. Royal inauguration and liturgical culture in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, 1099–1187 (Simon John)