Narrating the Crusades: Loss and Recovery in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature by Lee Manion (review)

In his 1395 Epistre au Roi Richart, Philippe de Mézières urges the English and the French to cooperate in order to recover the Holy Land and spread the teachings of Christianity in the East. In making his appeal, Philippe turns to figures made famous by romance, telling Richard II and Charles VI "one of you [will] be the noble Roland and the other the very perfect Oliver … one of you may imitate the very valiant … Charlemagne and the other that very bold … King Arthur, when you fight against the enemies of the Faith" (116). In Philippe's letter, the discourses of chivalric fiction bleed into the political and religious concerns of the contemporary world.

Throughout Narrating the Crusades, Lee Manion traces similar interactions between romance narratives and the historical contexts in which they were read and purposed to ideological ends. Manion uncovers the topical resonances of a group of texts that he labels "crusading romances," a genre whose contours coalesce over the course of his book. Certainly, the problem of genre is not an unusual concern for a scholar of medieval romance, but Manion's focus on a subcategory of romance, rather than on the genre as a whole, opens up new associations among texts not often read in conjunction with one another. Of obvious interest to historians and literary scholars, medievalists and early modernists, Manion's book demonstrates the value of using literary texts, and especially romance, in the study of the crusades, and of viewing the crusades as a fruitful context for cultural production.

While scholars have previously recognized that military-focused romances such as The Siege of Jerusalem are relevant to crusading history, Manion extends the definition of the "crusading romance" to include texts that exhibit one or more of the features that he argues are central to "crusading discourse"—including less-than-obvious documents such as Philippe's Epistre. The defining tropes of crusading discourse include: imagery of the cross, military campaigns against non-Christians, and pilgrimages undertaken in conjunction with combat. These features need not all appear in a given text for it to be considered a "crusading romance," a subgenre that Manion argues is unified by a rhetorical emphasis on "loss and recovery"—both territorial and salvational. In the crusading romances, Manion claims, the conflict of the narrative focuses on "reconquest," a trope encompassing both "the recovery of legitimate possessions for Christendom as well as the individual's 'recovery' of a state free from sin" (9). Thus, Sir Isumbras, with its story of one knight's penitential pilgrimage, and The Sowdone of Babylone, with its Christian military campaigns, can be understood as part of the same tradition.

Narrating the Crusades proceeds chronologically, tracing the development of the "crusading romance" alongside the equally active evolution of crusading from the early fourteenth century through the post-Reformation period. Although much of his study focuses on romances heretofore not understood within a crusading context, Manion begins with Richard Coeur de Lion, a military-focused account of Richard I's participation in the Third Crusade. Manion's intervention lies in his reading of Richard as an "anti-nationalist" text. While the trend in Richard scholarship—evident in the work of Thorlac Turville-Petre, Geraldine Heng, and others—has been to see the romance as an early attempt to craft an English national identity, Manion highlights Richard's interest in cross-cultural alliances. Additionally, his reading of Richard is distinguished from recent analyses that have foregrounded the more fantastic elements of the narrative, such as Richard's cannibalism or his demonic mother's inability to receive the Eucharist. Instead, Manion traces a lexicon of "associational forms" in the poem—words such as "frend" or "felawrade"—which, he argues, serve to highlight the "diverse, non-nationalistic" army privileged in the romance (21, 41). Throughout, Manion questions a teleological perspective...