English Literature and the Crusades

The study of English crusading literature experienced a significant boost in 2024 with the publication of Leila K. Norako's Monstrous Fantasies: England's Crusading Imaginary and the Romance of Recovery, 1300–1500 and this perceptive, nuanced book by Marcel Elias. English Literature and the Crusades establishes Elias as one of the foremost scholars on the subject while making a valuable contribution on postcolonial approaches to late medieval culture. Simply put, Elias argues that Middle English crusade romances are ambivalent texts that advocate crusading ideals and express anxieties about them. The book focuses on a set of texts produced during a long stretch of crusading defeats following the loss of Acre, the last mainland Christian stronghold in the Holy Land, in 1291, connecting their literary anxieties to a broader, growing sense of frustration, doubt, and self-questioning across Christian Europe.Applying a “hybrid methodology” (p. 17) that combines an “engaged historicism” (p. 6) with practices of adaptation and Emotion Studies, Elias's book contends that “emotions were an essential resource” (p. 8) for crusade romances, which often translate or revise existing materials. The book's four chapters are not organized chronologically but thematically, moving through the emotions of sorrow, anger, and vengeance to fear, shame, love, and friendship, and then ending with a return to sorrow, anger, and fear framed through excessive violence. The chapters examine different emotions in conjunction with some texts that long have been considered crusade romances, including The Siege of Jerusalem and Richard Coeur de Lion, and with others that have only been discussed in that way more recently, such as The Sultan of Babylon and Guy of Warwick. This arrangement enables Elias to highlight the romances’ relationship to a variety of other materials, including chronicles, chivalric biographies, crusade treatises, and devotional works. In this manner the book reveals the romances’ “historical consciousness” (p. 16) and invites crusade historians to engage more fully with them. At the same time, the book's attentiveness to the process of translation adds to a growing consensus among literary scholars that many of these anonymous English romances are not simply derivative works but instead employ creative revision to challenge or criticize Christian claims to superiority.The first chapter focuses on the way anger, sorrow, and vengeance are expressed in two Charlemagne romances, The Siege of Milan and The Sultan of Babylon, to critique Christian disunity and an apparent lack of divine support while also breaking down boundaries between Christian and Muslim. In The Siege of Milan, Bishop Turpin's anger at Charlemagne for initially failing to defend Christendom is set within the historical context of criticisms of European rulers’ inaction and tendency to pursue their own local interests. Significantly, however, Turpin's angry outburst at the Virgin Mary goes beyond this established framework. Here Elias, drawing on a body of underexamined complaint literature, including troubadour songs and the letters of the Dominican friar Riccoldo da Monte di Croce, finds that Turpin's nearly blasphemous attack on Mary raises the question whether heaven really supports crusading. By contrast, The Sultan of Babylon revises its source materials to create “representational shifts” and “Christian-Muslim symmetries” that encourage “mutual intelligibility” (p. 40). In this poem, Charlemagne's extreme anger puts him in a negative light, one further emphasized through the motif of the “afflicted Muslim” in which the Sultan Laban, like Turpin in The Siege of Milan and like some real Christians after the failure of Louis IX's second crusade, blames heaven for lack of support. Elias concludes that this motif was so popular in late medieval England because it met the “projective needs” (p. 48) of a deeply anxious society.The second chapter considers three related texts, Otuel, Otuel and Roland, and Duke Roland and Sir Otuel of Spain, all of which share the narrative element of the conversion of a powerful Muslim warrior who has challenged Charlemagne's court. In Elias's argument, these romances respond to wider European interest in converting non-Christians, who were regarded both as a dangerous threat and as potential allies in crusade treatises, sermons, and literary writing. Though commonly dismissed as derivative works based on French sources, the Otuel romances were adapted and revised to produce what Elias calls a “reverse Orientalism” (p. 51) in which righteous Muslims condemn Christian failures, prompting an emotional response of fear and shame. Indeed, Otuel's superiority to Roland and his ability to unite Christian forces against Muslim opponents after his conversion reflects more general awareness of Muslim “strength and moral discipline” (p. 69) in the period while condemning Christian pride.The second half of the book shifts away from Charlemagne and his peers to focus mainly on more local English heroes. The third chapter studies the popular Middle English romance Guy of Warwick in relation to chivalric ideology and the emotions of love and friendship. Guy's initial worldly pursuit of fame through love-service to his lady, Felice, is contrasted with his subsequent “conversion” into a penitent crusading pilgrim. As Elias explains, documents such as the anonymous chivalric biography of Marshal Boucicaut or the chivalric manual by Geoffroi de Charny attest to the imbrication of earthly love and chivalric honor with Christian and crusading ideals in the late fourteenth century. Such transient, temporal rewards are rejected by the romance in favor of the brotherly caritas and friendship of penitential crusading combat, which aligns more with the work of Philippe de Mézières or John Gower and with the life and devotional treatise of the English knight and crusader John Clanvowe.The final chapter considers two texts traditionally labeled crusade romances, The Siege of Jerusalem and Richard Coeur de Lion, through the emotions of vengeance and empathetic sorrow. Elias contends that these texts do not unambiguously express the “triumphant crusading spirit” (p. 129) which scholars typically assign to them, as their use of these emotions raises anxieties about the morality and effects of crusading violence. The Siege, which recounts the historical destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE by Titus and Vespasian, aligns the Romans with medieval crusaders and the suffering Jews with Muslims. However, as Elias argues, the infanticide and cannibalism of a starving Jewish mother invites readers’ empathy and becomes a commentary on the violence of merciless Christians, particularly when viewed in connection to accounts of the 1099 CE bloody conquest of Jerusalem during the First Crusade. In a parallel fashion, Richard Coeur de Lion, which depicts a fantastical version of Richard I's participation in the historical Third Crusade, utilizes the much-discussed cannibalism scenes, in which the English king eats his Muslim opponents, to interrogate the dehumanizing effects of crusading and to elicit compassion for non-Christians. This perspective is a constructive addition to previous scholars’ focus on these scenes in terms of nationalism, race, or theology while also serving to reemphasize the book's general point about the limitations of a “clear-cut Orientalist approach” (p. 5).Beyond the discerning insights found in these chapters, I am sure that many readers will appreciate the succinctness of Elias's book. Still, such brevity does produce some gaps. One is the general relegation of most recent scholarship on crusade literature to a handful of brief citations in the endnotes. Scholars such as Marianne Ailes and Philippa Hardman, Siobhain Bly Calkin, Leila K. Norako, Suzanne Yeager, and I have written substantially and thoughtfully on the romances under consideration while emphasizing crusading's broad cultural impact, its heterogeneity and contradictions, and the crusade romance's potential to question the enterprise. More dialogue with these accounts would have provided further support for the book's argument while putting Elias's findings in greater relief. A second gap is the limited context provided for historical and cultural texts. For instance, there is no indication that Riccoldo da Monte di Croce's Epistolae ad Ecclesiam Triumphantem (Letters to the Triumphant Church) on the fall of Acre to the Mamluks, for all their humanity, ambivalence, and potential questioning of God's plan, survive in only one manuscript and were his least-read work, in comparison to his widely disseminated Contra Legem Sarracenorum (Against the Law of the Muslims), an attack on Islam that probably was the most influential Latin treatise on the subject in the later Middle Ages, being extant in twenty-eight manuscripts and printed in 1500. Such qualification might help readers better compare the impact of Riccoldo's letters to, say, that of Marino Sanudo Torsello's recovery treatise (surviving in over nineteen manuscripts and printed in 1611) or Hayton of Korykos's treatise (surviving in over fifty manuscripts and printed in the sixteenth century). Of course, such disparities in textual transmission do not negate Elias's point—some pro-crusade texts also come down to us in a single manuscript, including the treatises by Fidenzio of Padua or Pierre Dubois—but they do suggest that the voices questioning crusading were the minority view.Such reservations aside, Elias's book advances existing arguments about crusading literature's topicality, longevity, and engagement while offering fresh interpretations of key texts through a focus on emotions. English Literature and the Crusades merits special praise for its location of crusade texts in a truly “international” milieu and for its rejection of oversimplified binaries. Indeed, the book's concluding call for a “a new history of medieval European views of, and self-definition in relation to, Muslims and Islam” that draws on the “pan-European archive” (p. 133) would complement and extend the work done by the international team behind Brill's Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History. Undoubtedly, there is a pressing need for further study of such “nascent, if imperfect, ideas of equality” (p. 134)

Ambivalence · English literature · Middle Ages · Middle English · Middle English literature · Romance · The Imaginary · History of Emotions Research · Medieval History and Crusades · Medieval Literature and History