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464 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE relationship between modern "placelessness" and contemporary agnostic malaise (284-99). J.Stephen Russell Hofstra University Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative. By Suzanne M. Yeager. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN978-0-521-87792-3. Pp. ix + 255. $99.00 (hardcover). Jerusalem, for late medieval Europeans, was at the same time a city, a symbol, and a goal. The very name of Jerusalem was, as Suzanne Yeageraptly states in her introduction to this densely argued study, "a palimpsest ready for inscription" (1). For the late-medieval British readers with whom Yeageris particularly concerned, Jerusalem was a place whose name sounded with a deep resonance: physically a long way from England, Jerusalem could yet be reached by the sincere of heart. The trip could take place in reality, through pilgrimage, or it could be a virtual trek of the spirit, a meditative crusade. It was as.object of conquest that Jerusalem had been in the minds of Western Europeans during the past three centuries; the capture and control of the Holy City had been the expressed goal of generations of Crusaders. Between 1095 and 1291 Europeans had engaged in a total of four such military campaigns. By the beginning of the fourteenth century England had military ambitions closer to home: the Hundred YearsWar would soon embroil her with France, forcing her to position herselfas a distinct nation-state in a Europe slowlyemerging into its Early Modern form. The religious conflict with Islam, so apparent during the height of the Crusades , was now replaced by others closer to hand; the period covered in Yeager's study begins at the time of Wycliffeand closes in the early years of the Protestant Reformation. The great Papal Schism plays its role during these times. These are also the years of Geoffrey Chaucer who, although he does not figure in this study, is contemporary with the earliest of the authors studied here. Chaucer 's Canterbury pilgrims will not be far from the reader's thoughts as he or she begins Jerusalem in MedievalNarrative. For if a "real" Crusade was not offering an immediate opportunity for devout English Christians to see Jerusalem-the British never did play an important role in the four Crusades; for all the hype surrounding Richard the Lion-Hearted, hero of the Third Crusade, this monarch's connections with Britain were tenuous at best-there was always pilgrimage. Jerusalem was available and open to pilgrims during the later Middle Ages, as access to the city was increasingly facilitated by the Venetians, whose control ofthe Eastern Mediterranean allowed them to establish a lucrative business in Holy Land travel. What did Jerusalem mean for an English Christian during this period? How did one imaginethe place? Its image will have been at the same time a product of BOOK REVIEWS 465 fantasy, of faith, and of Biblical exegesis. As the locus of Christ's Passion, a place touched by Divinity, the city was itself "a relic in its own right" (2). As a central location in Old Testament narrative, Jerusalem as a physical reality anchored the world of the here and now into the great antiquity of the scriptural past. According to the Bible, the Last Judgment would take place at Jerusalem (3). Add to this documentary presence the fact that for centuries Christian exegesis had made Jerusalem a potent image: of the divine Bride, of the long-suffering Christian soul, of the heavenly City of God. In this study, Suzanne Yeager has undertaken to tease apart the individual strands of meaning in the late-medieval English concept of Jerusalem. To do so, she has selected nine texts popular in England during the fourteenth through the sixteenth century and has submitted them to analysis. One of the most attractive features of Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative is the author's selection itself: these are texts that deserve the attention of a reading public wider than specialists in fourteenth-century English and French literature, but for the most part have not yet received it. Each represents a distinct reflection of Jerusalem in the medieval English mind: as goal of pilgrimage, prize of crusade, holy relic, focus of devotional meditation, instrument for Christian unification and regeneration...

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