Crusading and Ideas of the Holy Land in Medieval Britain ed. by Kathryn Hurlock and Laura J. Whatley (review)

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

• Crusading and Ideas of the Holy Land in Medieval Britain ed. by Kathryn Hurlock and Laura J. Whatley
• Ines Jahudka

Hurlock, Kathryn, and Laura J. Whatley, eds, Crusading and Ideas of the Holy Land in Medieval Britain (Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, 34), Turnhout, Brepols, 2022; pp. vii, 265; 5 b/w, 20 colour illustrations, 1 b/w table; R.R.P. €95.00; ISBN 9782503593883.

Recent historiography has moved beyond the notion of the Crusades as a series of military and political engagements. The Crusades are now examined as complex intercultural exchanges that remapped the Christian world and fundamentally impacted medieval European conceptualisations of the self. Kathryn Hurlock and Laura Whatley’s Crusading and Ideas of the Holy Land in Medieval Britain is an important contribution to this new historiographical approach. The collection of nine essays takes a multidisciplinary approach to the Crusades as a cultural marker, focusing on the idea of the Holy Land transplanted ‘in both its physical and metaphysical incarnations’ (p. 15) to medieval Britain. The collection positions crusading within the existing devotional relationship with the Holy Land but also highlights the complex impact of the idea of crusading on medieval British ideas of power, gender, devotion, and the built environment. The overarching theme of the work is the medieval ‘imaginative engagement with Jerusalem’ (p. 16), a conceptualisation that existed before, during, and after the Crusades themselves. The essays can be grouped into three general approaches: translation; memorialisation; and vicarious crusading. [End Page 228]

Meg Boulton’s essay opens the collection with an examination of the Church in pre-crusade Britain, showing how pilgrimage narratives, architectural interpretations of holy sites (such as the Wilfridian crypt at Ripon, duplicating the Holy Sepulchre), and carved stone crosses. This essay is followed by others with a similar theme of translation: Natalia Petrovskaia compares imago mundi encyclopedic representations of both Europe and the Holy Land in texts from several regional traditions (including Welsh, English, and Anglo-Norman). Petrovskaia demonstrates how Europe is portrayed as a geographic and political space, whereas the Holy Land remains ‘the timeless and eternally important “biblical” Orient’ (p. 43).

Marianne Ailes’s essay introduces themes of translation with her analysis of the mythologisation of Richard I’s in medieval manuscripts. Ailes compares French, Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English accounts of the Third Crusade and challenges the existing assumption that medieval translations were unoriginal. In a side-by-side comparison of the Latin and the vernacular productions, Ailes demonstrates how translators actively framed the myth of the crusader king.

The book then returns to the idea of the Holy Land’s topography transplanted to British shores. Elisa A. Foster and Laura Slater both examine the interplay between monuments, honour, leadership, and ideas of masculinity. Foster’s exploration of Walsingham as a pilgrimage site situates the shrine as an important compensatory device for Henry III, unable to depart for the Holy Land. Similarly, Slater’s essay examines monuments and masculinity: how four families of English crusaders recreated the sacred architecture of the Holy Land, linking the men (and their descendants) to the Crusades. These imitation ‘Jerusalems’ became ‘sites of dynastic rather than biblical memory’ (p. 117).

Rounding out the memorialisation is Hurlock’s intriguing examination of portraiture commissioned by the Stradlings, a Catholic Welsh family. The family’s portraits, Kathryn Hurlock argues, are representative of a trend in Welsh Catholic gentry to claim a (tenuous) link to the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre. This link served a twofold purpose: creating an ancestral connection to the Holy Land while distancing the family from the English Crown, with which the Crusades were associated.

The final three essays relate to medieval manuscripts as a way of vicariously experiencing a pilgrimage or crusade. Laura Whatley explores how the illuminated manuscript, the Lambeth Apocalypse, represented a ‘dynamic and martial crusade allegory’ (p. 172) and allowed its female reader, Eleanor de Quincy, to ‘image and participate in various aspects of crusading’ (p. 178). This essay is a fascinating exploration of the crusade movement relocated to the home front.

The two final essays examine later reworkings of crusader narratives. Erin Donovan examines the fifteenth-century addition of illuminations to reshape...