War and memory in European culture: a long perspective.

This project, the first large-scale study of war memory in premodern Europe, links the fields of war studies, medieval memory studies and premodern European history. Employing new cultural-historical, interdisciplinary and comparative methodologies, the project aims to clarify and explain how French, German, Italian and Spanish regional memories of the crusades - the religious wars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries - were created, expressed and progressively integrated into European cultural memory. The project will establish significant empirical and conceptual advances in our understanding of the continuous evolution and importance of war in regional memory, and new historical perspectives on the aftermath of religious conflict.