J002704/I), the Philip Leverhulme Prize, and the Walter Hines Page Fellowship at the National Humanities Center. This research was generously supported by an Arts & Humanities Research Council Research Networking Grant (ref. Or discussed aspects of it with me, particularly Jaroslav Fol da, Ora Limor, Nimrod Luz, Molly Murray, Maura Nolan, Timothy Phillips, Corey Sparks, Paul Strohm, and audiences at Brown University,įordham University, the London Medieval Society, the Social Church Workshop (Oxford), University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Yad Ben-Zvi (Jerusalem), and Yale University.
I amĪlso grateful to the many interlocutors in various disciplines who have either read drafts of this work Improved this article, and to Jacqueline Brown and Sarah Spence for their advice and feedback. I am very grateful to the anonymous readers who gave incisive and detailed comments that vastly Prison of Christ, particularly important is the fact that it is mentioned in John In terms of the Western European knowledge of the The Prison of Christ was by no means a marginal curiosity in the MiddleĪges accounts of it appear in some of the most widely read guides for pilgrimsĪnd travelers to Jerusalem. The production of an idealized Holy Land. I then explore the devotional and cultural meanings ofĬhrist’s imprisonment, showing the dynamic interplay between Eastern travelsĪnd Western reportage in which texts and material sites supported each other in In this essay I chart the site’sĮmergence, the kinds of knowledge Western pilgrims had about it, and the uses Individual, and the soul’s purgation and ascent. Adjacent to the most holy place at theĬenter of the medieval world, the Jerusalem Prison of Christ was a uniquely precious site in which pilgrims thought about grace, redemption, the imprisoned
Liminal, scenes for the emergence of a kind of Christian heroism comprising isolation, detention, victimhood, and grace. In medieval culture, an enclosedĬell-be it monastic, anchoritic, or in prison-was one of the paradigmatic, if Said to have been held before he was crucified. 1) here, from the Middle Ages to the present day, Jesus has been At the rear of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem’s Old City isĪ small chapel unlike the rest of the church, this chapel is usually quiet, calm,Īnd relatively little visited by tourists or pilgrims.1 This chapel is the “Prison ofĬhrist” (Fig.