New Work on the Crusades: Gender, Race, Memory, and the Future of a Field

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• New Work on the Crusades: Gender, Race, Memory, and the Future of a Field
• Megan Cassidy-Welch (bio)

Nicholson, Helen, Women and the Crusades, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2023; hardback; pp. 304; R.R.P. £25.00; 3 b/w maps, 4 family trees; ISBN 9780198806721. Simmons, Adam, Nubia, Ethiopia, and the Crusading World, 1095–1402, London, Routledge, 2022; hardback; pp. 252; R.R.P. AU $284.00; 1 b/w illustration; ISBN 9780367481216. Riley-Smith, Jonathan, and Susanna A. Throop, The Crusades: A History, 4thedn, London, Bloomsbury, 2023; hardback; pp. 480; R.R.P. AU $153.00; 22 b/w illustrations; ISBN 9781350028623.

A generation has passed since crusading historiography was dominated by the question: 'what was a crusade?'. Contemporary crusade scholars now proceed from a multitude of disciplines and theoretical positions (in something of a recent 'cultural turn') to explore a range of crusading experiences, contexts, and cultures well beyond the Latin West, the 'states' of Outremer and the medieval period itself. Crusading—as a set of religious movements, ideas, and encounters—shaped histories and cultures around the globe in different ways, directly and indirectly. As a sometimes nebulous historical category, crusading has been used to fabricate and describe political movements and ideologies. Crusading's long history means that its textual and material legacy is diverse and always promising; new studies on crusading epistolarity, narrative, and material remains, among other topics, continue to probe and illuminate how crusading was represented, disseminated, and remembered across time and place. The three books reviewed here traverse these and other historical and historiographical moments. Collectively they demonstrate the critical benefit of looking outward, critiquing boundaries, and seeking perspectives on crusading history that might at first glance seem to be tangential. Some of this new work is intended to build the foundations for new directions in scholarship; some seeks to communicate scholarship to audiences well beyond the academy. All engage in historical dialogue with past and present in different ways, reflecting on what we think we know about crusading history and its legacies, and how we come to form our knowledge.

Helen Nicholson's Women in the Crusadesexamines women's contributions to the crusading movement from the eleventh to the sixteenth century. Although women mostly did not take formal crusading vows, they certainly contributed in a [End Page 295]range of different ways to the promotion and longevity of the crusading movement. Nicholson's book is not the first full-length monograph devoted to women in the crusades, but it is certainly the broadest and is thus intended to reach a general as well as academic audience. ¹Following a short preface, the book's introductory chapter lays out some definitional criteria and addresses briefly the question of evidence, while four more substantive chapters explore 'Initializing Crusades', 'Crusade Campaigns', 'The Home Front: Supporting the Crusade', and 'After the Crusade: Memory and Imagination'.

The evidence for women's participation in crusading is frustrating only if we read at face value the much-studied Latin chronicles. Such texts are rich and useful narratives, but as narratives they were also composed with specific literary, spiritual, and rhetorical agendas in mind, and often with the benefit of hindsight and a commitment to the telling of providential history for particular textual communities. When women appear in these complex texts, they do so in the context of such aims:

writers on all sides of the conflict depicted women in traditional gendered roles [such as] pious virgins, faithful wives and carers, pure-hearted devotees of chivalry […] or they could be impious whores, weak-willed frail creatures easily led astray by their lusts, or powerful temptresses […] or innocent victims and suffering martyrs, or depicted as spoils of war, the just reward of the victor.

(p. 12)

These sorts of representations endured across the long history of crusading and on all fronts of these holy wars. Tropes drawn from literary culture also dominate representations of women and crusading. Nicholson draws critically on a rich repository of these creative texts alongside charters (long used as evidence of pious motivation for crusading) and other textual and material sources. ²

In the second chapter, Nicholson shows that noblewomen were involved in initiating crusades...