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Abstract:
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Epic dichotomies – threat /desire , Islam /Christianity , Orient /Occident , fear /lust , self /other – have fundamentally shaped the conceptualizations , images , and imaginings of the interaction between East and West . The Holy Land was the locus of both sensations in the twelfth -century West . Islam , arisen from the Arabian Peninsula and spreading steadily , embodied the strongest threat to western Christendom that it had yet faced , both militarily and theologically . The vividly imagined “East ,” particularly Jerusalem , was the locus of spiritual and material desire . These intertwined notions underlie the ideological , theological , and historical perceptions of the Crusades , in their own time as today .
This project seeks to explore the dual image of the East in the twelfth -century West through the prime dichotomy that has , both historically and presently , shaped Western perceptions of the dar -al -Islam : the East as at once threat and object or source of desire . Both this dichotomy and the examinations of individual sites and objects in which it is expressed nuance and challenge earlier scholarly assertions regarding visual representations of Crusading , and posit new interpretations of iconographic traditions and their semiotic functions in the twelfth -century Aquitaine .
This dissertation is arranged as a series of investigative essays into monuments and objects that express the presentation and development of these divergent ideas in the twelfth -century Aquitaine . The first half of is comprised of three interrelated examinations of material objects that illuminate Western concepts of Islam and Muslims . Various iconographic traditions , I argue , were created and modified to express the mechanisms by which Christendom attempted to define , and respond to , these evident threats to self and territory . The second half of this project focuses on the material manifestations of desire , primarily through the deployment of Orientalized architectural forms and the utilization of relics and objects related to the East . Although these trends , as my conclusion discusses , reached their true apex in the decades after the loss of Jerusalem in 1187 , these early examples typify the range of cultural notions centered on the desire to possess and control the sanctity of the Holy Land . |