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Books Features

New Medieval Books: Frankish Jerusalem

Frankish Jerusalem: The Transformation of a Medieval City in the Latin East

By Anna Gutgarts

Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 978-1-009-41832-4

After the First Crusade, Jerusalem became a melting pot of new settlers, leading to the rise of a transformed community. This book delves into 12th-century property records to uncover how these immigrants reshaped and redefined the city’s landscape.

Excerpt:

This book sets out to challenge this perception by tracking interlaced spatial and socio-economic aspects of urban development in the twelfth century. It aims to investigate the urban transformation of Frankish Jerusalem as a multifaceted and dynamic process that was shaped by a complex mosaic of religious aspirations as well as social, institutional and economic mechanisms that developed in the city after the Crusader conquest. The study examines the formation of these mechanisms and their correspondence with broader processes that were shaping socio-economic structures in the Latin East at the time, but also looks at how these processes corresponded with concomitant trends in medieval urbanisation. This analysis relies primarily on the extant corpus of Frankish documents, supplemented by pilgrimage accounts, chronicles and archaeological evidence.

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Building on methodologies widely applied in the study of medieval urban environments, this study attempts to tease out of the corpus patterns that reflect socio-economic interactions and their spatial manifestations in the city and its hinterland. Moreover, this synchronous reading of the evidence sheds new light on individual documents, thus providing a glimpse into everyday life in the city through property disputes, neighbourly interactions and the formation of social bonds in an immigrant population. In doing so, this book sets out to address some of the key questions concerning a cityscape that epitomises and symbolises the medieval encounter between western European perceptions and Middle Eastern realities.

Who is this book for?

This book takes a more technical approach, focusing on property transactions, setting it apart from other studies of 12th-century Jerusalem. It offers valuable insights for scholars of the Crusader States and the history of Jerusalem, while also appealing to those interested in the development of medieval towns. Readers should also access an online supplement: List of the Main Transactions in Jerusalem and Its Vicinity

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The Author

Anna Gutgarts is a Lecturer at the University of Haifa, where her research focuses on urban history and Crusader Jerusalem. You can learn more about Anna on her Academia.edu page.

You can learn more about this book from the publisher’s website 

You can buy this book on Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk

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