‘Theologians know best’: Paris-trained crusade preachers as mediators between papal, popular and learned crusading pieties

ABSTRACT The study of the crusades would be transformed if scholars started not with papal letters but with evidence demonstrating how organisers in various periods and regions served as brokers between papal, popular and learned discourses and crusading pieties. Surviving preaching materials suggest that Paris masters promoting various crusades forefronted contemporary reform campaigns targeting usurers, sexual incontinence and heresy. Preachers anticipated or responded to audiences’ concerns about specific elements of crusading, outlining various forms of participation while situating the crusade within a web of familiar or novel devotional practices. Promoters could ignore, (re)interpret and adapt the images and particulars presented in papal letters and often forwarded knowledge of local circumstances and substantial queries to the papal curia, thereby influencing future papal communications. Individual popes reacted in a responsive rather than dictatorial manner in both communication and policy, while papal communications were always subject to local interpretation and negotiated reception and implementation.