The Crusades - Colin Morris (essay date 1998)
Colin Morris (essay date 1998)
SOURCE: “Picturing the Crusades: The Uses of Visual Propaganda, c. 1095–1250” in The Crusades and Their Sources: Essays Presented to Bernard Hamilton, edited by John France and William G. Zajac, Ashgate, 1998, pp. 195–209.
[In the following essay, Morris examines the types of “visual propaganda”—such as placards and the windows and architecture of churches and halls—used to keep the crusading spirit alive.]
Pictures, commented Gratian, are the ‘literature of the laity’.1 The idea had received its classic statement long before, in Gregory the Great's ruling to Bishop Serenus of Marseilles: ‘pictures of images … were made for the instruction of the simple people, that those who do not know letters may understand the history’. Gregory's words provided the starting-point of medieval discussion of the use of images, and much modern commentary has followed the supposition that...
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