Last Bible and Crusade Narrative in the Twelfth Century by Katherine Allen Smith

Abstract

Reviewed by: Last Bible and Crusade Narrative in the Twelfth Century by Katherine Allen Smith Christopher Freeman Last Bible and Crusade Narrative in the Twelfth Century. By Katherine Allen Smith. (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2020. Pp. 306. $24.99. ISBN: 9781783275236). Katherine Allen Smith uses the lens of exegesis to uncover a novel twelfth-century practice of biblical hermeneutics that profoundly shaped early narratives of the First Crusade. Many of Allen Smith’s arguments will be familiar to students of medieval history, but The Bible and Crusade Narrative is anything but redundant. Allen Smith’s work offers new insights into the construction of early crusade narratives and the process whereby the First Crusade passed from memory to written record. Chapter 1, “History and Biblical Exegesis in the Latin West,” argues that medieval narrators saw the First Crusade as a miraculous text that was meant to be glossed. First Crusade writers used their exegetical training to create a new kind of historical narrative that was better suited to record events that seemed to have been ordained in heaven. Allen Smith illustrates that the widespread use of biblical references in early crusade accounts differed from the nearly contemporary accounts of the Norman invasion that predominantly used classical references to record the event. Allen-Smith’s comparative analysis is more comprehensive than previous studies and is able to restore “early crusade historiography to its original context in which the concerns of history and theology were inextricably linked” (p. 47). In Chapter 2, “The Bible in the Chronicles of the First Crusade,” Allen Smith uses quantitative data to “understand the relationship between scriptural study and history, and the ways in which the Bible mediated memory and lived experiences in the medieval Latin West” (p. 91). The author suggests that medieval scriptural study is the key to understanding “the chains of associative thinking that . . . hint at what the twelfth-century writers were thinking as they wrote” (54). Allen [End Page 182] Smith’s analysis of contemporary scriptural practice shows that early crusade accounts were written against “a backdrop of lively . . . debate about the crusade’s historical, allegorical, and eschatological significance” (p. 54). In Chapter 3, “Into the Promised Land,” Allen Smith argues that crusade authors displayed their exegetical training when they used biblical typologies to cast crusaders as Jerusalemites, apostles, and virtuoso performers of Christo-mimesis. Typological practice conditioned the portrayal of Muslims as well. Allen Smith demonstrates that crusade authors made use of the adversos iudeos tradition to cast Muslims according to typologies commonly found in anti-Jewish polemic. Allen Smith’s discussion is enlightening but ignores critical parts of the scholarly tradition. As Pollard and others have shown, medieval anti-Jewish polemic is strongly informed by the Latin tradition of Flavius Josephus, but Allen Smith ignores Josephus almost entirely. This illustrates a problem that results from Allen Smith’s tight focus on biblical allusion: it can create a blindness to other important narratological elements found in these same texts. These elements are important because we can’t fully understand biblical allusion until we consider how the Bible works in conjunction with other traditions that inform crusade accounts. Chapter 4, “Babylon and Jerusalem,” analyzes the impact of Augustinian ideology on early crusade accounts. Allen-Smith suggests that early crusade texts made use of Augustinian dichotomies because “the crusade actualized the conflict between the two cities” (156). Crusade authors applied Augustinian convention when they placed the crusade on the long arc of salvation history: “the crusaders’ literal fulfillment of the Gospel . . . set into motion a new apostolic age” (p. 171). The analysis sheds new light on the use of Augustine in early crusade narratives, but Allen Smith’s tightly focused analysis displaces other important textual considerations. For example, in Allen Smith’s analysis of Augustinian dualism in Baldric of Dol’s Historia, Baldric clearly frames the section of text according to Josephus’s Jewish War and “the deeds of Titus and Vespasian,” rather than Augustine’s City of God, as Allen Smith claims. Overall, The Bible and Crusade Narrative in the Twelfth Century is a much-needed addition to crusade studies and Allen Smith’s work will be a model for analyzing the impact of the...