The Medieval Crusade

The papers in this volume, first presented at the 2001 Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, represent major themes in recent scholarship on the medieval crusade and its religious, political and cultural context. Papers by Jonathan Riley-Smith re-evaluate the issue of "were the Templars guilty?" and argue that the Templars' problems were explicable in part by an organization much less coherent than that of the Hospitallers. Robert Chazan focusses on the importance of the crusade in Jewish-Christian relations, highlighting shared themes in Latin and Hebrew crusade chronicles and analyzing the role of crusading in Jewish-Christian polemics. Christopher McEvitt offers new insights into the relations of crusaders and indigenous Christians in the county of Edessa, arguing that these help to contextualize later developments in other crusader states. Other papers offer re-evaluations of Peter the Hermit (Jay Rubinstein), of the political and religious context and impact of the Fourth Crusade (Alfred Andrea, Thomas Madden), of the influence of the crusade on Piers Plowman (William E. Rogers), and of the political context for the failure of crusading ideals in fifteenth-century Burgundy (Kelly De Vries). Together these papers by leading scholars will be essential reading for all serious students of the medieval crusade.