"Sweetly Refreshed in Imagination": Remembering Jerusalem in Words and Images

Abstract

As Mary Carruthers has discussed, medieval monastic meditation employed mental pictures as tools for thinking and composing. In an evocative historical setting like Jerusalem, architecture became a powerful and multivalent cue in the process of meditation. This paper examines the accounts of several medieval pilgrims to Jerusalem, focusing not simply on what they record but the reasons they give for doing so. Memory in its creative and contemplative aspects is emphasized in several reports, notably that of John of Würzburg. In these accounts, the architectural setting testifies to the real presence of the events; the historical juxtapositions become a part of the construction of memory. Buildings like the Dome of the Rock (Templum Domini) and the Holy Sepulchre became loci of memory, nonnarrative, nonchronological organizers, as Old Testament, New Testament, and historical events are layered together at each site. Memory becomes creative in an associative way, encouraging the construction of meaning through the diachronic juxtapositions of events associated with place.