Introduction: texts and contexts

Summary

O England great cause thou hast glad for to be

Compared to the Land of Promise, Sion,

Thou attainest grace to stand in that degree

Through this gracious Lady's supportacion,

To be called in every realm and region

The Holy Land, Our Lady's Dowry:

Thus art thou named of old antiquity.

–from the “Walsingham Ballad”

Jerusalem has been represented for more than two millennia as a recurrent object of travelers' desire. Viewed as the cradle of three faiths – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism – the city serves simultaneously as the home of the Holy Sepulchre, the Dome of the Rock, and place of the Temple. In all cases the sacred city held and, for some, continues to hold value as the locus of scriptural and devotional imagination for the People of the Book. This study explores texts made by English medieval Christian writers who characterized the holy city in a multiplicity of ways. By the fourteenth century, English authors had, readily available to them, fully developed symbolic terms with which to describe Jerusalem. This terminology, enriched for over a millennium by figures such as Augustine, John Cassian, Gregory the Great, Bede, and many others, contributed to the theological refinement of the city's many senses. Likewise, in the hands of English, fourteenth-century writers, the holy city was like a palimpsest ready for inscription.