Hugeburc, an Anglo-Saxon nun who moved to Germany and became abbess of Heidenheim, undertook a biography of Willibald, who with his brother Wynnebald had travelled from England with his father on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Willibald eventually became bishop of Eichstätt in Bavaria. The heart of Hugeburc’s biography is concerned with Willibald’s experiences in the Holy Land, where he visited many sites mentioned in the Bible: he told Hugeburc of his adventures and she recorded them in a kind of diary form, which contrasts with the more elaborate style of the Latin she uses in the non-dictated sections.

Examines the Museum of the Bible as a site of pilgrimage that generates affective responses from visitors through immersive and interactive exhibits. Through its evangelical presentation of Jesus and sacralization of landscapes special to white evangelicals in the United States today, the museum works through a variety of media to conscript visitors into Christian supersessionism and Christian Zionism.

Chapter 3 moves beyond the boundary space of the sea to consider the landscape descriptions of “foreign” lands in medieval English romance. Despite the allure of fantasy and exotic settings endemic to the genre of romance, many Middle English texts create imaginative landscapes that delineate recognizably English topography. Intriguingly, such passages of landscape description also focus primarily on urban landscapes, emphasizing the economic and political interconnectedness of town and countryside. I look at similarities between these scenes, and consider why certain details come to be associated with these imaginative landscape settings in the texts of Titus and Vespasian and Kyng Alisaunder surviving in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 622, a manuscript saturated with tales of the Holy Land and the Far East. These texts may champion the ability of landscape engineers to reshape the base clay of Creation, but they also use the distant lands of the Middle and Far East as spaces to contemplate the hubris of such actions in a Christian universe – especially in the increasingly hazardous ecological events English readers experienced at the close of the Middle Ages.

This chapter explores the Custody of the Holy Land as a legal, spiritual and cultural product of the Holy Land. It explores its roots in Catholic spirituality and pilgrimage, the Holy Land as a shared religious landscape, and the influence of Islamic law/Ottoman governance.

This final chapter explores competition between Franciscan reform traditions over jurisdiction in the Custody to understand the Holy Land's importance as a Franciscan sacred landscape, and custodial administration as a manifestation of Franciscan authority and legitimacy.

Greek-rite monasticism in the Holy Land and Syria experienced difficulties arising from external conditions in the first millennium, including invasion and conquest, poverty and loss of contact with the political centre of the Byzantine Empire. Nevertheless, monasticism continued to function in some important centres. Before the time of the First Crusade, a revival had already begun, especially in northern Syria and Cyprus. The establishment of the Latin Church as a result of the First Crusade both enhanced and challenged this revival, in ways that are exploredin this survey chapter of Orthodox monasteries in the Crusader States.

The Crusades have always been a focus of historical attention. William of Tyre (c.1130–86) wrote a great history of the crusades in Latin which was so well received that in the early thirteenth century it was translated into French and extended in many versions to cover the period after 1186. The French version was so popular that the Renaissance scholar, Francesco Pipino, unaware of the original, translated it back into Latin, while Caxton produced an English version in the fifteenth century.1 Many of the earlier crusader chronicles, notably Robert the Monk’s account of the First Crusade, were also very popular in the Middle Ages and were edited very early in the age of print, notably in the great collection by Jacques Bongars in 1611.2 In modern times the crusades have always been a contentious subject, as President George Bush discovered when he referred to a ‘crusade against terrorism’ shortly after 9/11.