French Inscriptions in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: From the Written Word to the Museum

Epigraphic transition to writing in the vernacular languages was one of the most striking phenomena in the sociocultural history of medieval Europe from the twelfth century onward, affecting all domains of written culture and progressing at different paces in different places. This transition took place in the Crusader states, as in France, in the mid-thirteenth century, but here with a radical turn from medieval Latin to Outremer French—an Old French dialect used in the Latin East. This paper examines isolated French words (names) in the extant inscriptions from the Kingdom of Jerusalem, tracing the transitional stages and identifying the actors and events instrumental in this shift. Is this transition simply a reflection of the limited preserved corpus of inscriptions? or can it be related to the history of the Crusader Kingdom, specifically the sojourn of the French King Louis IX in the Holy Land? This paper subsequently focuses on how the Outremer French inscriptions were viewed by the nineteenth-century orientalists and relates to the role that the inscriptions played in the conception of language in terms of national identity, and their place in the museums of France.