Rewriting Liminal Geographies: Crusader Sermons, the Katherine Group, and the Scribe of MS Bodley 34

Much of the Katherine Group’s critical history has centered on its West Midlands regionalism and dialect. This article disrupts this regional focus to think more internationally. What is this manuscript’s place among the more international events and religious trends sweeping continental Europe in relation to the Crusades? This article will focus on crusader sermons and their connection to the Katherine Group in order to reframe the reading of the manuscript. The author evaluates the Katherine Group’s participation in international crusading rhetoric and how it performs an imaginative version of “geopiety.” The author also examines the scribal note at St. Juliana’s end and how it directly borrows from a popular circulating crusader sermon. This English text is casting itself as part of an international genre fixated on a different geography—the eastern Mediterranean—that highlights the geographic and generic liminality of these texts.