Search Results
Abstract
Using the Latin chronicles of the First Crusade as a tertium comparationis, this article mainly focuses on the hermeneutical challenges in scrutinizing and understanding medieval constructions of alterity (and identity, respectively). In the first part, larger questions concerning the limits and possibilities for historiography to represent the “other” are explored, asking about the importance of Medievalism and Modernism as well as Orientalism and Occidentalism as discursive formations for shaping representations of “Islam and the West” in recent debates. The second part focuses on the genre-specific ways medieval crusade chronicles were able to address Muslim alterity. The third part argues for the performative quality of attributions of identity and alterity and for the specifics of temporal and spatial processes in creating “the Orient” as a place of identity and continuity in the context of the First Crusade.