... of Christendom to pray to God to beseech aid in prosecuting holy war. Every major crusading initiative after was supported by a program liturgical supplication. This was a devotional response. And it was part of a larger program of social reform and pastoral organization that sought to widen spiritual...

...This concluding chapter summarizes the preceding discussions and presents some final thoughts. In seeking to explore the intersections between liturgy and crusading, this book offers several broader contributions. The first is to give greater texture to the premise that the crusades were...

...This book examines crusading as a family affair during the high Middle Ages. It suggests that the support of the medieval nobility for crusade expeditions in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was shaped fundamentally by knowledge and attitudes that were preserved, transformed, and transmitted...

...Map 1. Sites of preservation and display of crusade memorabilia in the Limousin before 1183 This chapter examines the material framework around which social memory of the early crusaders was constructed. Precious cloth in general, and silk in particular, was easy to carry, and would have made...

...This epilogue discusses the apparent endurance of crusading enthusiasm in the families of King Henry II of England and King Alfonso II of Aragón at the dawning of the thirteenth century. More specifically, it considers how the nobility remained the lifeblood of the crusade movement long after royal...

... vision of crusading is in many ways threatened by the implicit complications of history that it seeks to avoid. While Richard Coer de Lyon resembles the romances of the previous chapter in its establishment of cultural binaries and in its elevation of crusading over other martial...

...When the First Crusade ended with the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, jubilant crusaders returned home to Europe bringing with them stories, sacred relics, and other memorabilia. In the ensuing decades, the memory of the crusaders' bravery and pious sacrifice was invoked among the noble families...

... narrative and structural ways, the chapter contends that these three romances share and adopt recovery themes and impulses, and that all three are deeply invested in crusading ideologies and aspirations. Considering these texts as part of the recovery romance tradition proves vital, then, because it points...

...This chapter situates two representative Middle English Charlemagne romances—Otuel and Roland and the Ashmole Ferumbras—in the recovery romance subgenre. These works, if contextualized alongside other examples of crusading literature and against their contemporary...

...This chapter evaluates Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Chaucer's investment in matters of crusading courses its way through several of the tales, and the chapter offers a comparative study of the Squire's Tale, the Man of Law's Tale...

...This chapter examines the meaning of the crusades for nobles who thought about their family past. More specifically, it discusses the mechanism that links narratives of ancestry and the crusading past. It also considers how performances in celebratory public environments reminded twelfth-century...

...Figure 1. Returning crusaders present Elisabeth of Thuringia with her husband’s ring. An early artistic representation associated with the cult of Saint Elisabeth, on the golden reliquary shrine containing her relics. Shrine of Saint Elisabeth, Saint Elisabeth’s Church, Marburg. Richard Hamann...

...This chapter looks at the liturgy of crusade in an attempt to appreciate the devotional and religious texture that the rites of prayer and intercession brought to the crusading experience. Unlike most of the rest of this book, which is organized around the evidence found in the liturgical volumes...

... of this chapter bespeak men's (and women's) understanding of their relationship to God, offer an interpretation of fifteenth-century events, and reveal an apocalyptic anxiety pinned to the Ottoman specter (different in agency and reception from the apocalyptic expectations of the early crusaders). Above all...

...This chapter examines how the image of the crusader fit into discourses of ancestry, tradition, and responsibility that were already in place at the time of Pope Urban II's preaching at Clermont in 1095. It first considers the written memorandum created by Count Fulk IV le Réchin of Anjou in 1096...

... was used as a metaphor for crusading in general and to foretell and explain the family's participation in the crusades. It begins by considering how historians viewed the eleventh-century pilgrimages to Jerusalem in the light of the First Crusade and goes on to discuss the miraculous victory of those who...

... as his failure to lead crusades despite repeated appeals to him during a period of great crisis on the crusading frontiers in Spain. When he made his testament, Alfonso named his executors, elected his place of burial, and established his temporal and spiritual legacies. Alfonso divided the lands he...