Jerusalem, the Distant Origin: Conceptions of Home among the Medieval Orders of Palestine

The aim of this subproject is to undertake a comparative analysis of the textual, performative, and material models of Heimat—of “home”— which were developed by Christian orders in the Middle Ages. The study seeks to show by what means, and with what success, an idea of extraordinary historical weight yet striking abstraction—Jerusalem as a “distant homeland,”—was translated into models meant to help people navigate the realities of everyday life.

The subproject focuses on four religious orders and associations that emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the so-called Crusader States of the Levant, and on their relationship to Jerusalem, the most potent of all homeland models. In doing so, it draws attention to the reciprocal dynamics between an imagined homeland and a physical one. For the institutions established in Palestine drew upon older notions of a “Jerusalem homeland,” reshaping them to meet changing times, their own needs, and the expectations of contemporary believers.

The project will benefit from the trans-epochal and trans-regional comparative framework of the Collaborative Research Centre, where concepts of a “holy land” and the power of the Jerusalem homeland model already play a central role, as well as from the theoretical approaches contributed by the participating disciplines. In turn, the project will enrich the centre’s collective research by examining an understudied archetype: the sanctified, long-distance notions of homeland and the ways in which institutions located in that very distant homeland adapted them.

The subproject examines the practices and representations through which medieval visions of Jerusalem were expressed. Above all, however, it places the Jerusalem homeland model at its centre, treating it as a transcultural phenomenon of special relevance for diachronic analysis.