Overview

This collection offers a holistic understanding of the impact of both crusading and settlement on the literary cultures of Latin Christendom. The period between the First Crusade and the collapse of the ""crusader states"" in the eastern Mediterranean was a crucial one for medieval historical writing. From the departure of the earliest crusading armies in 1096 to the Mamluk conquest of the Latin states in the late thirteenth century, crusading activity, and the settlements it established and aimed to protect, generated a vast textual output, offering rich insights into the historiographical cultures of the Latin West and Latin East. However, modern scholarship on the crusades and the ""crusader states"" has tended to draw an artificial boundary between the two, even though medieval writers treated their histories as virtually indistinguishable. This volume places these spheres into dialogue with each other, looking at how individual crusading campaigns and the Frankish settlements in the eastern Mediterranean were depicted and remembered in the central Middle Ages. Its essays cover a geographical range that incorporates England, France, Germany, southern Italy and the Holy Land, and address such topics as gender, emotion, the natural world, crusading as an institution, origin myths, textual reception, forms of storytelling and historical genre. Bringing to the foreground neglected sources, methodologies, events and regions of textual production, the collection offers a holistic understanding of the impact of both crusading and settlement on the literary cultures of Latin Christendom.

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9781783277339

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ANDREW D. BUCK is Lecturer in Medieval History at Cardiff University and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. JAMES H. KANE is Lecturer in Medieval History at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. STEPHEN J. SPENCER is Assistant Professor in Medieval History at Northeastern University London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. SUSAN B. EDGINGTON is a Teaching and Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London KATHERINE J. LEWIS is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Huddersfield. Thomas W. Smith gained his PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London; he is presently Keeper of the Scholars and Head of Oxbridge (Arts and Humanities) at Rugby School. BETH C. SPACEY is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Queensland.

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