The city lament: Jerusalem across the medieval Mediterranean (1st edition.)

Poetic elegies for lost or fallen cities are seemingly as old as cities themselves.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, this genre finds its purest expression in the book of Lamentations, which mourns the destruction of Jerusalem; in Arabic, this genre is known as the ritha al-mudun.

In 'The City Lament', Tamar M. Boyadjian traces the trajectory of the genre across the Mediterranean world during the period commonly referred to as the early Crusades (1095-1191), focusing on elegies and other expressions of loss that address the spiritual and strategic objective of those wars: Jerusalem.