Damietta the Whore, the Purification of the Virgin Mary, and the Crusade Movement

ABSTRACT It is rare to be able to trace the sharing of ideas among a network of preachers from surviving narrative evidence, letters, reportationes, and sermon collections. It is rarer yet to be able to link liturgy, sermons, and artwork to reconstruct how their audiences might have received and interpreted these messages. However, this article accomplishes precisely that, by examining how the crusade, particularly the fight against heresy and the capture of Damietta in Egypt, was presented by a network of individuals involved in the promotion of the crusade movement to audiences in the crusader camp and on the home front. These individuals, most of them trained or active in Paris, include: Peter of Roissy, Absalon and John the Teuton, abbots of Saint Victor, Jacques de Vitry and Oliver of Paderborn, Innocent III and Honorius III, Philip the Chancellor, John Halgrin of Abbeville, Odo of Cheriton, Thomas of Chobham, and Odo of Châteauroux. Preachers adapted materials familiar from collections of sermones de tempore and de sanctis, that is, sermons for the dedication of churches (and the anniversary of them) and for the Purification of the Virgin Mary (Candlemas) to the preaching of the Fifth and Albigensian crusades and the crusade of Louis IX, and spiritual and psychological connections to the Holy Land and anti-heretical crusades were then rewoven back into sermons for the devotional year. This article is part of a larger project tracing this process, and a table of sermons consulted is appended.