Introduction: Writing the Holy Land

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The Holy Land, where the events of the lives of Jesus Christ and the Apostolic Community took place, played a major role in the construction of a Christian identity. Yet its representation and history were far from fixed or predetermined, but subject to re-mediation and continual re-presentation over decades and centuries and in different media. In particular, the last centuries of the Middle Ages saw the production of a considerable volume of literature related to the Holy Land. The experience of the late medieval Holy Land was deeply connected to the presence of the Franciscans of the Convent of Mount Zion in Jerusalem, who welcomed and guided pilgrims. This introduction explains why it is necessary to look at the role of Franciscan writings on the Holy Land when analysing the construction of a shared memory of the holy places. The chapter shows how our approach to the study of a “shared” memory is connected to the notion of collective memory, as developed by Maurice Halbwachs, but it also makes a case for approaching the construction of such a memory of the Holy Land with the help of new developments within the study of cultural memory, which view memory as dependent on intermediary levels of reflection, constructed in different media. I argue that this can be done by studying the elaboration and diffusion of Franciscan compilations, manuscript miscellanies and treatises on the Holy Land and their reception in medieval pilgrimage literature.