Introduction: material religion in the crusading world

Abstract

This short essay introduces Material Religion in the Crusading World, a special issue that brings together a group of scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds working on aspects of Latin Christian material religion between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. The particular focus of the special issue is on the materiality of devotion across the “crusading world”—a space that is broadly defined as those parts of medieval Europe and the Near East that were in some way affected by the experience of transcultural religious violence, whether directly, such as in Christendom’s frontier regions in the Holy Land and the Iberian Peninsula, or indirectly, such as the heartlands of Latin Christianity in England, France, Germany and Italy. Taken together, the papers within the special issue explore the medieval crusading movement as material religion, with a particular focus on bodies, things, and spaces.