Gendering the Crusades (review)

Reviews 185 Parergon 20.2 (2003) Edgington, Susan B., and Sarah Lambert, eds, Gendering the Crusades, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2001; paper; pp. xvi, 210; RRP £14.99; ISBN 078316980. This collection of 13 essays extends a tradition of crusade studies concerned with women, which in Australia has included Maureen Purcell’s seminal ‘Women Crusaders: a Temporary Canonical Aberration?’ (in Principalities, Powers and Estates: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Government ed. L. O. Frappell, Adelaide, Adelaide University Union Press, 1979, pp. 57-64) and Graham McLennan’s Women Crusaders. Women and the Holy Land 10951195 (Hawker, Australian Capital Territory, Hawker College Parents and Citizens Association, 1997; missing from Edgington and Lambert’s Bibliography.) Use of the term ‘gender’ allows the thirteen international scholars to range beyond the experiences of women only, although, in fact, these form the major theme of most of the essays. The blurb suggests that all those working on aspects of ‘gender history’ will benefit from this book. Its themes of inclusion and exclusion, identity and worldview , certainly have wider relevance, but the contributions assume a familiarity with the progress of crusades, and with their complicated and unreliable sources. Though barely touching on the Albigensian, Baltic and Iberian crusades, the essays range widely in space and time; Elizabeth Siberry even looks at nineteenth-century representations of crusaders. A non-specialist would be well advised to begin with Constance M. Rousseau’s study of the papal predication of each crusade to 1221, in which she details the sections of society which successive popes tried to attract to the cause. Unfortunately, even the eye-witness accounts of Urban II’s call to the First Crusade were not written down for several years, by which time his vision of an armed pilgrimage of lay noblemen had inspired the poor and dispossessed, members of the clergy and women of all classes to make their way East. Sarah Lambert opens the collections by discussing the simplistic dichotomies into which contemporaries often divided medieval society, and the challenge to these which crusading experience represented. The model of warlike male/ passive female needing protection was thrown into question not only by the presence of female leaders and warriors on the battlefield, but by the Byzantine, Arab and Turkish cultures to which crusaders were exposed. As Matthew Bennett demonstrates, they could rationalise the attachment of Byzantine males to all that they considered effeminate, by characterising them as treacherous and 186 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) cowardly, their military inadequacy the root cause of the crusades. Finding the Turks to be worthy battlefield adversaries led to a re-appraisal of their culture, and the development of a hybrid civilisation in the Kingdom of Jerusalem which never ceased to shock newcomers from the West. The position of women in this Kingdom is Sylvia Schein’s subject. The Church attempted to deter noblewomen from making the journey, partly because they were needed at home to administer crusaders’ estates and raise monies. Some of the real – and apocryphal – experiences detailed in Yvonne Friedman’s chapter ‘Captivity and Ransom’ were used as propaganda. One of the paradoxes of this hyper-masculine society, existing on a perpetual war footing, was that high male mortality left a succession of heiresses in pivotal dynastic positions. Their ability to exert power relied on their access to armed men, one of whom it would be necessary to marry. The combination of pilgrimage, which involved sexual abstinence, with the gendered activity of warfare has the effect of excluding women, as well as other non-combatants like the poor (who could not afford the necessary equipment), the aged and children, from other than incidental appearances in the crusade chronicles. Susan B. Edgington examines their portrayal in the Old French Chanson d’Antioche, and Natasha Hodgson compares the chronicles’ depiction of a Turkish noblewoman, the mother of the general Kerbogha. To the Frankish, mainly clerical, writers: ‘Kerbogha is a fool for not paying attention to his mother’s wisdom, as it ultimately leads to his downfall’ (p. 168). On the other side, Muslim writers are a major source for evidence of crusader women on the battlefield, as the essays of Michael R. Evans and Keren CaspiReisfeld...