Research Project summary:

The Holy Land, as the site of the life of Jesus Christ and the Apostolic Community, played a major role in the construction of a Christian identity. During the Late Middle Ages, the representation of the Holy Land in Western Europe was shaped to an important extent by the Franciscans of the Convent of Mount Zion in Jerusalem. This project will investigate how they contributed to the construction of a cultural memory of the Holy Land in the Medieval West. By doing so, the project will address the wide issue of the construction of a cultural memory through different media, investigating the three main dimensions of the elaboration of a cultural memory of the Holy Land in the Late Middle Ages: the rituals, the visual perception and the texts. This research project will also contribute to the more general issue of how cultural memory constructed through different media in a specific and limited social group (in this case the Franciscans of Mount Zion) could expand into a broader social context and influence the identity, in this case religious, of a broader social group.