War and Memory at the Time of the Fifth Crusade by Megan Cassidy-Welch (review)

The twentieth-century profusion of war memorials, veterans’ groups, and national memorial-holidays—particularly commemorating World War I—has led some historians to propose a modern ‘boom’ in war memory. Launching a medievalist of Cassidy-Welch’s skill into such a historiographical battleground proves refreshing. The Middle Ages, itself a semiotic source for pro-war fanaticism during the First World War, provides Cassidy-Welch an opportunity to reconsider the historiography. While earlier periods, she argues, focused on martyrdom, sacrifice, and redemption, modern vocabularies prefer to frame war in terms of loss, trauma, and necessity, signalling an epistemic shift. Focusing on the Fifth Crusade, Cassidy-Welch analyses the nature of the qualitative shift and offers possible reasons for it. The book thus contributes to both medieval history and the history of war memory.

Cassidy-Welch’s volume asks why remembering war was so important to early-thirteenth-century writers and what purposes remembrance served. The book purports to argue that ‘crusading possessed a unique temporal and spatial logic in which remembering was central’ (p. 3). The crusade, as Cassidy-Welch shows, was enshrined in individual and collective memory, through family; cultures of martyrdom; liturgy and collective prayer; regional identity constructs before the rise of the nation state; and so on. Contemporary writers indeed considered crusading a part of the arc of biblical or providential history. For example, as readers of Nicholas Morton’s work, among others’, will know, warrior culture and martyrdom were interpreted through the lens of the ‘ever-popular’ Maccabees (p. 36). The crusading movement, as a whole, memorialized Christ’s life; that much seems obvious. Cassidy-Welch therefore wonders why the early thirteenth-century crusades ended up in Livonia, Byzantium, Spain (that is, the reconquista), southern France, and Egypt, with ‘sites of memory’ (p. 15) for particular families and regional groups springing up in these places. Following Nicholas Paul, Cassidy-Welch considers family memory important to ‘aristocratic self-fashioning’ (p. 11), but the early thirteenth century saw this evolve, due to the rise of new theatres of war and genres of writing such as vernacular histories and crusading romances.

Cassidy-Welch’s chapters consider crusaders preparing and managing how their actions will be remembered; eye-witnessing as memory-authority; the memorialization of crusaders; remembering loss; places of memory; and the memorialization in home territories of objects or relics associated with the crusade. Cassidy-Welch shows that some similarities exist between modern and medieval practices of war memory: the desire for a nice funeral; regrets about young decedents’ loss of a prosperous future; instructions on the disposal of property; expressions of love to family; and expressions of higher purpose. Nevertheless, these wishes are historically contingent; thus, crusaders wished to memorialize their membership of a military-religious confraternity or their financial contribution thereto. Creating memory is thus a ‘social process and a tool for socialization’ (p. 21), whereby shared identity and purpose are created.

All in all, the Fifth Crusade has rarely been a focus for crusade scholars. So, although it does not replace them, Cassidy-Welch’s volume can be added to the useful work of Reinhold Röhricht, James Powell, Joseph Donovan, Bernard Hamilton, Jean Richard, and others. But Cassidy-Welch’s volume does something altogether different, and very valuable. It tells a story of thought-worlds and cultural practices. As a whole, the piece is interesting, well written, and makes an important historiographical contribution, particularly in its later chapters on places of remembrance and the materials of memory, where the analysis finds its greatest novelty. I particularly enjoyed the stories of individuals and their families, which go a long way to humanizing our own memory of the crusaders. Cassidy-Welch is to be congratulated.