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Edward L Holt
I am the Interim Department Head and Assistant Professor of History at Grambling State University. I am a former Fellow with the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study. I completed my PhD in the Department of History at Saint Louis University in 2018. My dissertation, "Liturgy, Ritual, and Kingship in the age of Fernando III of Castile-León (r. 1217-1252)", traces how the royal court and ecclesiastical hierarchies of thirteenth-century Castile represented and articulated conceptions of power at various levels of society. In particular, I focus on three overlapping spheres of discourse, moving from the royal projections of the king's court to the local manners of worship by the ecclesiastical hierarchies to the cultural transmissions between political and religious borders.
Address: Edward Holt
Grambling State University, History Department
403 Main Street
Grambling, LA, 71245
Address: Edward Holt
Grambling State University, History Department
403 Main Street
Grambling, LA, 71245
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This article uses a little-studied Templar Sacramentary in order to explore the religious intersections of international military orders with crusading ideology and local piety in thirteenth-century Catalonia. As opposed to the Knights Hospitaller, whose houses all followed the same canonical liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre, the Templars adapted their religious needs to the local rites available. This article situates this Templar Sacramentary within its local devotional landscape in two ways. It first traces the influences by which this rite conformed to local Barcelona usage. Contesting the traditional idea of passive reception, the second half of the article analyzes the distinct ways that the sacramentary diverged from its liturgical models as the task of crusade found expression within the text. It provides a threefold examination of prayer adaptations, iconographic representations, and cross devotions in order to connect religious piety and crusader ideology. Consequently, crusading influences on the everyday rhythm of liturgical life demonstrate the role of the Templars within the Crown of Aragon as a religious order.
There exist a range of crusading sources, often well-known texts, that are currently not being as extensively used as they could be. The Cantigas de Santa María, typically read as a devotional text in praise of the Virgin Mary and descriptive of miracles worked through her intercession, is a central document for understanding crusading mentalities in thirteenth-century Castile. This article will examine three particular characteristics – Mary as intercessor, Mary as warrior, and Mary as missionary – to demonstrate one avenue through which the court of Alfonso X of Castile (r. 1252–1284) projected royal ideas about crusading. Even though much of Alfonso X's crusading efforts came to naught, Alfonso's vision, encoded within the Cantigas de Santa María, is a means through which historians can more fully illuminate the rhetoric of crusade in the thirteenth century.
Contributors are Martín Alvira, Carlos de Ayala Martínez, Janna Bianchini, Bárbara Boloix-Gallardo, Cristina Catalina, Francisco García Fitz, Francisco García-Serrano, Edward L. Holt, Kyle C. Lincoln, Miriam Shadis, and Teresa Witcombe.
The dissertation is organized into five parts, each focusing on a different moment of negotiation with articulations of rulership and power. Chapter one examines the royal chancery records in order to demonstrate the ways that Fernando III and his court projected the signs and symbols of kingship. Moving from an analysis of how kingship was articulated at court, the dissertation traces the ways that notions of kingship were disseminated at the local level and how localities formed a fluid space where these ideas were elaborated and tested in both directions. In particular, the dissertation examines liturgy in order to analyze the representation of kingship outside the royal sphere, incorporating rituals of power as expressed in the regular liturgical rhythm of everyday life and making the figure of the king ubiquitous. Chapter two explores how the image of the living monarch was articulated in complementary (and at times contradictory) ways shaped by the interests of the institution and presented a dialogue with the vision articulated by the royal court. The chapter focuses on texts (missals, pontificals, and sacramentaries) and architecture. Since representations of rulers continued to influence political culture in Iberia long after their deaths, chapter three examines liturgical articulations of deceased monarchs, tracing how royal figures were remembered within death's attendant rituals and liturgy. This chapter presents a study of the rituals of death and power through an examination of martyrologies, obituaries, and necrologies, which shed new light on how kings were remembered locally. The final aspect of the dissertation involves the reception and memory of Castilian political theology at the greatest distance from its original articulation: across religious and political boundaries. Chapter four analyzes diplomatic relationships with Christian European kingdoms. This section addresses moments of interaction with France, England, and the Holy Roman Empire, and other Iberian polities such as Aragon, Navarre, and Portugal. Finally, chapter five explores the same process of negotiation at the other adjacent Iberian political border with the successive North African Muslim dynasties. Through an examination of various Arabic-Islamic literary sources, this close analysis of Muslim context yields insights into issues of rulership and the tropes associated with it as the Maghreb and Iberia functioned as a contiguous system that transcended religious and political boundaries.
The series challenges the application of the concepts of cores and peripheries, and both-side transmission of organizational patterns, social customs and religious-ideological concepts. It is intended as a platform to show how the relationship between religion and war has shaped and changed in the process of long duration in a vast territory of medieval world, and how and why it has weakened and faded in some places and gained prominence in others. To date, studies of the relationship between religion and war have been viewed primarily through the paradigms of holy war and crusade, which have proven ideological chameleons difficult to grasp. Rather than applying these largely artificial notions, the works published in this series will show through the lens of sources how, in the historical process, religion, ritual, eschatology and biblical thought have shaped the imaginary and practice of war, and, conversely, how war has determined religious customs, imaginary and rhetoric.
The series welcomes submissions (monographs and edited volumes) on Western Europe and Byzantine world, but is also particularly keen to regions less well studied within the themes of the series, situated in between those great centers of medieval Christianity.
This article uses a little-studied Templar Sacramentary in order to explore the religious intersections of international military orders with crusading ideology and local piety in thirteenth-century Catalonia. As opposed to the Knights Hospitaller, whose houses all followed the same canonical liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre, the Templars adapted their religious needs to the local rites available. This article situates this Templar Sacramentary within its local devotional landscape in two ways. It first traces the influences by which this rite conformed to local Barcelona usage. Contesting the traditional idea of passive reception, the second half of the article analyzes the distinct ways that the sacramentary diverged from its liturgical models as the task of crusade found expression within the text. It provides a threefold examination of prayer adaptations, iconographic representations, and cross devotions in order to connect religious piety and crusader ideology. Consequently, crusading influences on the everyday rhythm of liturgical life demonstrate the role of the Templars within the Crown of Aragon as a religious order.
There exist a range of crusading sources, often well-known texts, that are currently not being as extensively used as they could be. The Cantigas de Santa María, typically read as a devotional text in praise of the Virgin Mary and descriptive of miracles worked through her intercession, is a central document for understanding crusading mentalities in thirteenth-century Castile. This article will examine three particular characteristics – Mary as intercessor, Mary as warrior, and Mary as missionary – to demonstrate one avenue through which the court of Alfonso X of Castile (r. 1252–1284) projected royal ideas about crusading. Even though much of Alfonso X's crusading efforts came to naught, Alfonso's vision, encoded within the Cantigas de Santa María, is a means through which historians can more fully illuminate the rhetoric of crusade in the thirteenth century.
Contributors are Martín Alvira, Carlos de Ayala Martínez, Janna Bianchini, Bárbara Boloix-Gallardo, Cristina Catalina, Francisco García Fitz, Francisco García-Serrano, Edward L. Holt, Kyle C. Lincoln, Miriam Shadis, and Teresa Witcombe.
The dissertation is organized into five parts, each focusing on a different moment of negotiation with articulations of rulership and power. Chapter one examines the royal chancery records in order to demonstrate the ways that Fernando III and his court projected the signs and symbols of kingship. Moving from an analysis of how kingship was articulated at court, the dissertation traces the ways that notions of kingship were disseminated at the local level and how localities formed a fluid space where these ideas were elaborated and tested in both directions. In particular, the dissertation examines liturgy in order to analyze the representation of kingship outside the royal sphere, incorporating rituals of power as expressed in the regular liturgical rhythm of everyday life and making the figure of the king ubiquitous. Chapter two explores how the image of the living monarch was articulated in complementary (and at times contradictory) ways shaped by the interests of the institution and presented a dialogue with the vision articulated by the royal court. The chapter focuses on texts (missals, pontificals, and sacramentaries) and architecture. Since representations of rulers continued to influence political culture in Iberia long after their deaths, chapter three examines liturgical articulations of deceased monarchs, tracing how royal figures were remembered within death's attendant rituals and liturgy. This chapter presents a study of the rituals of death and power through an examination of martyrologies, obituaries, and necrologies, which shed new light on how kings were remembered locally. The final aspect of the dissertation involves the reception and memory of Castilian political theology at the greatest distance from its original articulation: across religious and political boundaries. Chapter four analyzes diplomatic relationships with Christian European kingdoms. This section addresses moments of interaction with France, England, and the Holy Roman Empire, and other Iberian polities such as Aragon, Navarre, and Portugal. Finally, chapter five explores the same process of negotiation at the other adjacent Iberian political border with the successive North African Muslim dynasties. Through an examination of various Arabic-Islamic literary sources, this close analysis of Muslim context yields insights into issues of rulership and the tropes associated with it as the Maghreb and Iberia functioned as a contiguous system that transcended religious and political boundaries.
The series challenges the application of the concepts of cores and peripheries, and both-side transmission of organizational patterns, social customs and religious-ideological concepts. It is intended as a platform to show how the relationship between religion and war has shaped and changed in the process of long duration in a vast territory of medieval world, and how and why it has weakened and faded in some places and gained prominence in others. To date, studies of the relationship between religion and war have been viewed primarily through the paradigms of holy war and crusade, which have proven ideological chameleons difficult to grasp. Rather than applying these largely artificial notions, the works published in this series will show through the lens of sources how, in the historical process, religion, ritual, eschatology and biblical thought have shaped the imaginary and practice of war, and, conversely, how war has determined religious customs, imaginary and rhetoric.
The series welcomes submissions (monographs and edited volumes) on Western Europe and Byzantine world, but is also particularly keen to regions less well studied within the themes of the series, situated in between those great centers of medieval Christianity.