The City Lament - by Tamar M Boyadjian (Hardcover)

About the Book

Poetic elegies for lost or fallen cities are seemingly as old as cities themselves. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, this genre finds its purest expression in the book of Lamentations, which mourns the destruction of Jerusalem; in Arabic, this genre is known as the ritha al-mudun. In The City Lament, Tamar M. Boyadjian traces the trajectory of...

Book Synopsis

Poetic elegies for lost or fallen cities are seemingly as old as cities themselves. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, this genre finds its purest expression in the book of Lamentations, which mourns the destruction of Jerusalem; in Arabic, this genre is known as the ritha al-mudun. In The City Lament, Tamar M. Boyadjian traces the trajectory of the genre across the Mediterranean world during the period commonly referred to as the early Crusades (1095-1191), focusing on elegies and other expressions of loss that address the spiritual and strategic objective of those wars: Jerusalem. Through readings of city laments in English, French, Latin, Arabic, and Armenian literary traditions, Boyadjian challenges hegemonic and entrenched approaches to the study of medieval literature and the Crusades.

The City Lament exposes significant literary intersections between Latin Christendom, the Islamic caliphates of the Middle East, and the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia, arguing for shared poetic and rhetorical modes. Reframing our understanding of literary sources produced across the medieval Mediterranean from an antagonistic, orientalist model to an analogous one, Boyadjian demonstrates how lamentations about the loss of Jerusalem, whether to Muslim or Christian forces, reveal fascinating parallels and rich, cross-cultural exchanges.

Review Quotes

"Drawing on texts in Latin, Arabic, and Armenian, this innovative study takes the shared tradition of lamentations over the city of Jerusalem as a window onto the complex cultural politics of the eastern Mediterranean in the so-called age of crusades. Reading with a literary critic's eye for nuances of style, convention, and intertextual allusion, Tamar Boyadjian shows the historical and historiographical stakes of the shifting representations of Jerusalem in the century from the First Crusaders' conquest of 1099 to the founding of the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia at the close of the twelfth century and beyond. "

--Sharon Kinoshita, Professor of Literature and Co-Director of the Center for Mediterranean Studies, UC Santa Cruz

"Tamar M. Boyadjian's book is an impressive, unique, and original work of scholarship in several ways that make significant, imaginative contributions to fields of and approaches to the study of medieval literary and religious culture. This refreshingly global approach to the literary history of the genre establishes the context for the study's cross-cultural, multilingual, and multi-religious study of crusading era lament over Jerusalem."

--Adnan A. Husain, Associate Professor of History, Queen's University, Kingston

"The City Lament is an important and well-conceived study that will make a significant contribution to the field. Boyadjian widens our frame of reference by bringing in the enormously significant Kingdom of Armenia, enhancing our understanding of this crucial period of history."

--Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Professor of English and Medieval Studies, and Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto

About the Author

Tamar M. Boyadjian is Assistant Professor of Medieval Literature at Michigan State University.