Adorabimus in loco ubi steterunt pedes eius. The Physical Reality of the Holy Land and the Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre in the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, 1099-1187

Ausloos, Matthias [UCL]

The historiography of the Crusades has already been conducted extensively. However, its religious history, though one of its core elements, has only recently received academic attention. The study of liturgy, moreover, has only very recently been tapped as a research topic. The present paper focuses on the evolution from “crusade liturgy” – the liturgy in preparation for and during the military campaigns – to “crusader liturgy”, which the people of the Kingdom of Jerusalem practiced. In that development process of the liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre we could discern characteristics, the most important of which was the special connection with the physical space of the Holy City, both in its earthly, tangible and in its heavenly, eschatological and theological form. Having established the ways in which liturgy was deployed to shape and propagate a theological self-understanding, it could be shown that two main tendencies of biblical reinterpretation are employed as a function of the Crusaders’ self-understanding. In answer to the research question posed, we argued that the physical reality of the Holy Land exerted a very strong influence on the specific form of the liturgy of the regular canons of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem. The specificity of the liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre came about against the background of, on the one hand, a typological application of Old Testament narratives and, on the other hand, the explicit and highly detailed New Testament spatial, temporal and personified (Christo-)mimesis. Both tendencies and their externalization in the liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre strongly determined and shaped the ideological and theological self-understanding of the Crusader identity.