FINDING JERUSALEM IN MEDIEVAL PONTEFRACT

Abstract

IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN THOUGHT, the city of Jerusalem, site of Christ’s Passion and the centre of the world according to Psalm 73 (74):12 collapsed all distinctions and defied all definitions of time, space and place. It was both earthly city and theological concept, functioning simultaneously as Biblical witness, future site of the events to come in Revelation and allegory for the heavenly Jerusalem. 1 Accessible to all as a spiritual destination, the earthly city was thus unusually ‘movable’, ‘transferable’ and ‘translatable’. Its topography and buildings were remapped on to cities across Europe, through material and imaginative recreations of its major landmarks or supposed appearance. These could be highly developed, as in the close copy of the eleventhcentury Church of the Holy Sepulchre built at the church of Santo Stefano in Bologna. Its features included a replica tomb aedicule placed in the same off-centre position as the original, and a similitudine of the Column of the Flagellation. 2 Yet even the minor passing comment of the London Annalist that the capital was dressed ‘as a New Jerusalem’ when decorated for a royal adventus in 1308 served to inscribe the urban landscape with theological meaning. 3 This article will highlight two previously unknown examples of this process of imaginative translation and visual recreation, both found in the West Yorkshire town