Kevin James Lewis
College: Merton
Supervisor: Dr Christopher Tyerman (Hertford)
Thesis title:The internal aspects of the county of Tripolis in the twelfth century
Research Interests
I am primarily interested in the political, cultural, and social fabric of the Latin East (often referred to as the ‘crusader states’) and how this represents a discourse between the western heritage of the settlers and the eastern context which they found themselves in. For my DPhil I am focusing on the county of Tripolis, which roughly corresponds to modern Lebanon and was established after the First Crusade by a branch of the commital family of Toulouse. I particularly wish to explore the extent to which cross-Mediterranean contact between the people of the south of France and their relatives who settled in the East continued throughout the twelfth century. I also intend to re-assess the impact of the various indigenous groups. These have often been forgotten or ignored by historians, who prefer to study or dismiss the crusader states as an outcrop or colony of western Europe without fully appreciating just how well the settlers adapted to local conditions. Scholarship of the county of Tripolis has suffered from the French neocolonialism prevalent in the first half of the twentieth century, and from an all-consuming focus on the kingdom of Jerusalem in the predominantly Israeli scholarship of the later twentieth century.
Projects and Publications
My main project is my DPhil thesis. I am also preparing my master’s dissertation on the relationship between the Templar and Cistercian religious orders for publication in the coming year. I shall be presenting a paper at the International Medieval Conference in Leeds, 11-14 July 2011, on the topic of the economy of the county of Tripolis in the early thirteenth century, a period defined by a strengthening of the overall position of the ‘crusader states’ in the Middle East in the wake of the collapse of Saladin’s ‘empire’.