La crociata dei bambini

Perhaps the true meaning of the Crusades is to be found in the tales of the forgotten and the marginalised, who never fit perfectly into the great story of humanity. In order to ensure the transmission of a memory that might otherwise fall into complete oblivion, Schwob takes up and reinvents the records that proved impossible for the official discourse to evoke to compose a poetic symphony singing a historical fact with at once legendary and blurred outlines: the pilgrimage of 7,000 children towards the Holy Sepulchre during the era of the Crusades. Through a polyphony of multiplying and alternating voices, readers accumulate narrative fragments to weave the threads of potential historical constellations. A rhizomatic and maze-like narration that rejects any unequivocal and pre-established historical truth, lending itself to a variety of interpretations. Thus, the author shakes off the exhaustive and all-absorbing narrations enacted by historiographical endeavours to conceive poetics of history accompanied by ethics of memory based on oblivion (and necessary for the realisation of events free from any ideology).