Abstract
The term ‘material culture’ defies the well established categories of art history and archaeology. Institutionally the term and the field of study that it has generated since the 1980s imply connections with anthropology, archaeology, the history of collecting and museums, and an interdisciplinary approach.1 Within the strict parameters of the term, material culture stands as a counterpart to art as it studies the products of the industrial arts; it is interested on the banal and the quotidian as opposed to High Art. Rather than thinking about the hand of a master, the study of material culture begs for understanding of the organization of the so-called industrial arts, the collective lives of craftsmen, the modes of production and the ways in which the artefacts reached the market and the home. In short, material culture deals with commodities rather than Art.
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Notes
Reading Material Culture: Structuralism, Hermeneutics, and Post-structuralism, ed. C. Tilley (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1990); The Meanings of Things: Material Culture and Ayrnbolic Expression, ed. I. Hodder (London and Boston, 1989); Approaches to Material Culture: Research for Historical Archaeologists: a Reader from Historical Archaeology, ed. D. R. Brauner (California, Penn., 2000); Art and Artifacts: Essays in Material Culture and Museum Studies in Honor ofJane Powell Dwyer, ed. D. Juli (Providence, R.I., 1992); Experiencing Material Culture in the Western World, ed. S. M. Pearce (London and Washington, DC, 1997); History from Things: Essays on Material Culture, ed. S. Lubar and W. D. Kingery (Washington, DC, c. 1993); The Material Culture Reader, ed. V. Buchli (Oxford and New York, 2002).
C. N. Johns, ‘Excavations at Pilgrims’ Castle, ‘Atlit (1932); The Ancient Tell and the Outer Defences of the Castle’, Quarterly of the Dept. of Antiquities of Palestine, 3 (1934), 152–64; A. Boas, ‘Islamic and Crusader Pottery (c. 640- 1265) from the Crusader City (Area TP/4)’, in Caesarea Papers: Straton’s tower, Herod’s Harbour, and Roman and Byzantine Caesarea: Including the Papers given at a Symposium held … on 25–28 March, 1988, ed. R. L. Vann (Ann Arbor, 1992); King Herod’s Dream: Caesarea on the Sea, ed. K. Holum et al. (New York and London, 1988).
A. J. Boas, Crusader Archaeology: The Material Culture of the Latin East (London and New York, 1999); R. Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom ofJerusalem (Cambridge, 1998); R. Ellenblum, ‘Construction Methods in Frankish Rural Settlements’, in The Horns ofHattin, ed. B. Z. Kedar (Jerusalem, 1992), pp. 168–89; D. Pringle, ‘Medieval Pottery from Caesarea’, Levant, 17 (1985); E. Stern, ‘Excavations of the Courthouse Site at Akko: The Pottery of the Crusader and Ottoman Periods’, Atiqot, 31 (1997).
For an overview of the establishment and evolution of the field see: J. Folda, The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1098–1187 (New York, 1995); J. Folda, ‘The Saint Marina Icon. “Maniera greca”, “Lingua franca” or “Crusader Art”?’ in Four Icons in the Mesnil Collection, ed. B. Davezac (Houston, 1992).
The field has been dominated by studies in architecture, scuplture and manuscript illumination, the most important of which are: P. Deschamps, ‘La sculpture francaise en Palestine et en Syrie a l’epoque des croisades’, Monuments etMemoires (fondation Piot), 31 (1930); C. Enlart, Les Monuments des croises dans le royaume de Jerusalem; architecture religieuse et civile (Paris, 1925); H. Buchthal, Miniature Painting in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Oxford, 1957); J. Folda, CrusaderManuscriptlllumination atSaintJean d’Acre, 1275–1291 (Princeton, 1976); K. Weitzmann, ‘Icon Painting in the Crusader Kingdom’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 20 (1966).
The most vocal studies following this trend are: L.-A. Hunt, ‘Art and Colonialism: The Mosaics of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem (1169) and the Problem of “Crusader” Art’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 45 (1991), 69–85;
A. Weyl Carr, ‘Art in the Court of the Lusignan in Cyprus’, in Cyprus and the Crusades, ed. N. Coureas and J. Riley-Smith (Nicosia, 1995), pp. 239–74; M. Georgopoulou, ‘Orientalism and Crusader Art: Constructing a New Canon’, Medieval Encounters: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Culture in Confluence and Dialogue, 5 (1999), 289–321; B. Zeitler, ‘“Sinful Sons, Falsifiers of the Christian Faith”: The Depiction of Muslims in a “Crusader” Manuscript’, Mediterranean Historical Review, 12 (1997), 25–50.
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G. Vikan, Byzantine Pilgrimage Art, Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Collection Publications, 5 (Washington, DC, 1982).
For examples of crusader ampullae see: Folda, Art of the Crusaders, pp. 294–7; D. Syon, ‘Souvenirs from the Holy Land: A Crusader Workshop of Lead Ampullae from Acre’, in Knights of the Holy Land: The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, ed. Silvia Rozenberg (Jerusalem, 1999), pp. 110–15.
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See note 6 above and B. Zeitler, ‘Cross-cultural interpretations of imagery in the Middle Ages’, Art Bulletin, 76 (1994), 680–94; B. Zeitler, ‘Two Iconostasis Beams from Mount Sinai: Object Lessons in Crusader Art’, in Ikonostas: proiskhozhdenie, razvitie, simvolika, ed. A. Lidov (Moscow, 2000).
Published by Kurt Weitzmann, The Icon (London, 1982), p. 220.
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Among the many influential works of these two scholars are: S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean society; The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols (Berkeley, 1967-); and R. S. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971).
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Ziadeh, Urban Life in Syria, p. 31.
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Lopez, Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, p. 96; and F. Balducci Pegolotti, La pratica della mercatura, ed. A. Evans (Cambridge, Mass., 1936); D. Jacoby, ‘A Venetian Manual of Commercial Practice from Crusader Acre’, in Comuni italiani nel regno crociato di Gerusalemme, ed. G. Airaldi and B. Kedar (Genoa, 1986), pp. 403–28; R. Lopez and G. Airaldi, ‘Il piu antico manuale italiano di pratica della mercatura’, Miscellanea di studi storici, 2, Fonti e Studi 38 (Genoa, 1983), pp. 99–117.
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L.-A. Hunt, Byzantium, Eastern Christendom and Islam: Art at the Crossroads of the Medieval Mediterranean, 2 vols (London, 1998); R. Nelson, ‘An Icon at Mount Sinai and Christian Painting in Muslim Egypt during the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries’, Art Bulletin, 65 (1983), 201–18; E. Dodd, The Frescoes of Mar Musa al-Habashi: a Study in Medieval Painting in Syria (Toronto, 2001); A. Weyl Carr, ‘The Mural Paintings of Abu Ghosh and the Patronage of Manuel Comnenus in the Holy Land’, in Crusader Art in the Twelfth Century, ed. J. Folda (Oxford, 1982), pp. 215–44.
The seal is illustrated in Y. Friedman, ‘Pilgrims in the Shadow of the Crusader Kingdom’, in Rozenberg, Knights of the Holy Land, p. 108, fig. 3, and H. E. Mayer, Das Siegeiwesen in der Kreuzfahrstaaten (Munich, 1978), pl. 2, figs 17–18.
C. J. Lamm, Oriental Glass of Mediaeval Date found in Sweden and the early history of lustre-painting (Stockholm, 1941), p. 63; J. Allan and W. Henderson, ‘Enamels on Ayyubid and Mamluk Glass Fragments’, Archaeomaterials, 4 (1990).
E. Atil, Renaissance of Islam. The Art of the Mamluks (Washington, DC, 1981), p. 126; and Georgopoulou, ‘Orientalism and Crusader Art’.
D. S. Rice, ‘Inlaid Brasses From the Workshop of Ahmad al-Dhaki al-Mawsili’, Ars Orientalis, 2 (1957), 283–4 and n. 9.
J. Leroy, Les manuscripts syriaques a peintures conserves dans les bibliotheques d’Europe et d’Orient (Paris, 1964), p. 259, pl. 60, fig. 2; p. 335, pls. 111–13; pl. 130, 134/2, and 135/2; J. Leroy, Les manuscripts coptes et coptes-arabes illustres (Paris, 1974), p. 126, pl. 54, fig. 1.
Goitein, Mediterranean Society, vol. 1, pp. 99–110 and vol. 2, pp. 289–96; N. A. Ziadeh, Urban Life in Syria Under the Early Mamluks (Beirut, 1953).
R. Katzenstein and G. Lowry, ‘Christian Themes in Thirteenth-Century Islamic Metalwork’, Muqamas, 1 (1983), 53–68; E. Baer, Ayyubid Metalwork with Christian Images (Leiden, 1989).
Georgopoulou, Burning Incense in the Islamic and Byzantine Near East (forthcoming).
A. Carr Weyl, ‘Art in the Court of the Lusignan Kings’, in Cyprus and the Crusades, ed. Coureas and Riley-Smith, pp. 239–74.
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Lamm, Oriental Glass ofMedieval Date; R. Smidt, Das Glas (Berlin and Leipzig, 1922); I. Krueger, ‘Research in Medieval Glass. Where Are We Standing Now?’, in Annales du 13e Congres de l’Association Internationale de l’Histoire du Uerre. Pays Bas 28 aout1 septembre 1995 (Lochem, 1996), pp. 283–4.
S. Carboni, ‘Oggetti decorati a smalto di influsso islamico nella vetraria muranese: tecnica e forma’, in Arte Veneziana e arte Islamica. Atti del primo simposio internazionale sull’arte veneziana e l’arte islamica. Venice, Ateneo Veneto 1986, ed. E. J. Grube (Venice, 1989), p. 153; M. Verita, ‘Analytical Investigation of European Enameled Beakers of the 13th and 14th centuries’, Journal of Glass Studies, 37 (1995), 83–4.
D. Pringle, ‘Some Approaches to the Study of Crusader Masonry Marks in Palestine’, Levant, 13 (1981), 173–99, esp. 176–7.
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Georgopoulou, M. (2005). The Material Culture of the Crusades. In: Nicholson, H.J. (eds) Palgrave Advances in the Crusades. Palgrave Advances. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524095_5
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