Abstract

© Al-Masaq, 8 (1995): 79-153 "EXCOMMUNICATA GENERATIONE": CHRISTIAN IMAGERY OF MISSION AND CONVERSION OF THE MUSLIM OTHER BETWEEN THE FIRST CRUSADE AND THE EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY Lucy-Anne Hunt University of Birmingham Summary It is the awareness, perceptions and change brought about through contact and interaction with others that individuals and societies become aware of their own distinctive features. Beliefs and prejudices about the Other, therefore, contribute towards the articulation of the defining factors of self. Every society, past and present, in various ways, shaped or shapes its own identity in relation to an external Other. This issue was brought into sharp relief during the period of the Crusades, when contact between east and west was intensified, bringing Christians into more intimate contact with Muslims, as well as Jews and eastern Christians, in the eastern Mediterranean in addition to Spain. This paper is concerned with visual imagery expressing the shift in western attitudes to non-Christians, specifically Muslim Arabs, between the First Crusade at the end of the eleventh century to the loss of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Syrian mainland by 1291 and through into the early fourteenth century.11 argue that during the twelfth-to-thirteenth centuries an iconography of