ABSTRACT
Standing at the forefront of modern understandings of memory, theories of “social” and “collective” memory hold that understandings of and attitudes toward the past are not primarily individual, but inherently social: living within, and at the interstices between, groups and networks. Studies of social memory have highlighted the wide variety of different contexts in which collective memory can inhere (what Pierre Nora called the “organizations found in nature”),1 but for Maurice Halbwachs, the theorist who first introduced the concept of social memory, the family always occupied a special place.2 Because, “[o]ur kin communicate to us our first notions about people and things,” the family was always the fundamental framework (cadre) of memory for Halbwachs.3 As distinct from other groups, Halbwachs believed, families have specific mnemonic practices, are concerned with certain types of memories, and are likely to invoke the past to certain didactic and normative ends.4 In the pre-modern world of the Crusades, the kin group occupied a central place at the core of other social structures, in politics and in other cultural traditions.5 Therefore, if we are to understand how aspects of the crusading phenomenon were remembered or how aspects of the Crusades were constructed and represented within different communities, kinship must always occupy a special place in our inquiries.
