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Remembering the Crusades and Crusading ed. by Megan Cassidy-Welch (review)

2023; The Catholic University of America Press; Volume: 109; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cat.2023.a899385

1534-0708

John D. Cotts,

Historical and Linguistic Studies

Reviewed by: Remembering the Crusades and Crusading ed. by Megan Cassidy-Welch John Cotts Remembering the Crusades and Crusading. Edited by Megan Cassidy-Welch. (New York: Routledge. 2017. Pp. 266. $56.95. ISBN: 9781138811157.) Megan Cassidy-Welch has assembled an excellent and exceedingly helpful set of contributions on the ways in which the meaning of crusading was constructed and reconstructed through historical memory. That the crusades informed the creation of family and, ultimately, national histories, has been central to crusades studies for two decades now, and several contributors to this volume have been instrumental in bringing this insight into the scholarly mainstream. Remembrance, as [End Page 400] these scholars have recently shown, was as essential as ecclesiastical prescription in helping to define the crusades for contemporary Christians. Following upon Cassidy-Welch's introduction, six chapters on "Sources of Memory" (Part II of the volume) survey the vehicles through which Christians encountered crusading memory. According to M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, when the liturgy celebrated the 1099 conquest of Jerusalem with invocation of the Psalms and Isaiah, the city's capture "was in a sense taken out of time and submerged through Prophecy into Eschatology" (p. 42). A similar sensibility informed the composition of the crusade sermons that provide the subject of Jessalynn Bird's essay. An event in historical time, when liturgically remembered, partakes of eternity. The next two chapters in Part II similarly provide a bridge from the ideological and military aspects of crusading to the quotidian experience of Latin Christians. Elizabeth Lapina's amply illustrated contribution on visual culture shows how crusading informed the artistic representation of saintly intervention (again relating the crusades to a larger divine plan), while Anne Lester demonstrates that Christians recreated the sacral importance of crusading through the preservation of material objects. Part II concludes with thoughtful studies of historiography and romance as genres that both conveyed and re-negotiated the memory of the crusades. Part III includes five essays on "Communities of Memory," which for the purposes of this volume include monasteries, royal dynasties, various examples from the Jewish diaspora, and families with cross-generational commitments to crusading. Katherine Allen Smith demonstrates that the monastic memory of the crusades, like everything else monastic, was a communal endeavor, constructed through memories of returned crusaders, but always mediated by the exegesis of exemplary wars in scripture. The medieval and modern memory of medieval kings, and indeed the very notion of Capetian sacred kingship, also built on crusading exploits, as discussed in a useful summary by James Naus and Vincent Ryan. For Jewish communities, on the other hand, invoking the memory of crusader violence, and papal protection from it, was a matter of collective safety. Rebecca Rist reads two Hebrew texts—the Terrible Event of 1007, and Shelomo bar Shimshon's chronicle of the First Crusade—as part of a continuing negotiation over the pope's role in safeguarding the Jews of Latin Christendom. In the final essay in this part of the book, Nicholas L. Paul and Jochen G. Schenk revisit some of Paul's earlier ideas about the role of crusading in creating family memories, using an impressive theoretical framework to explore kinship relations within crusading families. Family memories inspired and even obliged further participation in the movement. Part IV includes four excellent contributions to the burgeoning literature on the enduring cultural resonance of the crusades in both medieval and modern contexts. Late medieval Byzantine chroniclers, despite the availability of early sources like Anna Comnena's Alexiad, reckoned primarily with the sack of Constantinople in 1204—a reckoning that continues to influence modern accounts of the relations between eastern and western Christians (as neatly outlined Jonathan Harris's contribution). Ana Rodríguez turns her attention to Iberia where, as scholars have long [End Page 401] argued, the memory of the crusades cannot be separated from the experience of the so-called "Re-conquest." The final two essays of the volume directly confront the weaponization of crusading memory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Alex Mallett traces the evolution of Muslim views of crusading from the twelfth century through the age of European imperialism and beyond, offering a useful corrective to recent claims that the rhetoric...