Crusading as an Act of Vengeance, 1095–1216 (review)

In a closely argued, lucid, and thoughtful study of the motif of vengeance in the formative century of crusading practice and discourse, Susanna Throop has made an important contribution to our understanding of the place of the crusade within twelfth-century culture; of crusading’s rhetorical dimensions; and of the ways in which it exploited a wide range of social, political, historical, and textual referents to create and sustain its impact on numerous people’s imaginations. In the process, Throop mounts a strong challenge to the current scholarly orthodoxy, which maintains that vengeance as an animating idea for crusaders was most pronounced at the time of the First Crusade (1095–1101) and tailed away thereafter as historians, preachers, and apologists of crusading developed discursive strategies that were more congenial to educated clerical sensibilities. This, Throop argues persuasively, inverts the actual chronology of the importance of ideas of crusading as vengeful violence; crusade-as-vengeance in fact becomes more prominent over the course of the twelfth century. Moreover, historians’ assumptions about the discrete categories of elite and popular cultural fields, she argues, do not stand up to the evidence for the movement and interplay of ideas and images between different literary genres bearing upon crusading, a discursive flexibility that established a rich linguistic field within which notions of vengeance were able to circulate and influence one another. Many challenges have been made in the past, of course, to the elite-popular binary, but Throop makes her case with care and insight, grounding her arguments in a close and measured reading of her mostly narrative sources.

A number of criticisms may be made of the book. The mobilization of those crusade-related texts that do not feature vengeance as a central element of their target language is sometimes a little tentative, and their potential value as contextualizing control material is consequently diluted. The promise of a methodological approach that is “modified structuralist” is perhaps not fully realized. One feels that there is a more extensive lexical and semantic field operating on the margins of, and interpenetrating with, the terms such as ultio and vindicta that are especially targeted for analysis—a wider, if less tidy, discursive frame that would have probably permitted further layering of the argument.

Overall, however, this is an extremely valuable book with important things to say about the motive forces behind crusading as a collective and self-avowedly moral endeavor. Many of its particular points—about the importance of the Crucifixion as a potent symbol of vengeful righteousness for crusaders; about the ready conflation of Jews, Muslims, and heretics as the victims of vengeful sentiment; about vengeance as an organon of social memory; and about the language of zeal as an animating force within vengeful crusade rhetoric—are striking and exciting. In general, Throop’s book is valuable as a demonstration of what can be gained from a reading of crusade texts that is closely attentive to questions of language and meaning-making. One hopes that more such work will be undertaken, for the study of crusading stands to be substantially enriched by discursively-aware research into its extensive narrative source-base. This substantial book makes an excellent start.