The Practices of Crusading: Image and Action from the Eleventh to the Sixteenth Centuries, by Christopher Tyerman

Abstract

This volume comprises fourteen essays by a distinguished and influential scholar of the crusades. The first of these essays appeared in print in 1982, and the most recent is an essay which is published here for the first time. As is typical of the Variorum format, the articles mostly retain their pagination and typesetting, so as to facilitate their continued use under their original references. A striking feature of the volume is the chronological depth and geographic breadth of its constituent articles. Their scope encompasses the half-millennium between 1100 and 1600, and variously homes in on the Holy Land, France, England, the Baltic and elsewhere besides. The essays are divided into three sections, which have a similarly varied conceptual focus. The first tranche comprises five essays which examine the blur of crusading activity which took place in Europe between the fall of the last vestiges of crusader territory in the Holy Land in 1291 and the outbreak of the Hundred Years War. These articles focus on the concerted, yet ultimately unsuccessful, efforts to organise new expeditions in France in that period. The first of these pieces examines the career of Marino Sanudo Torsello and the circumstances in which he wrote his Book of the Secrets of the Faithful of the Cross (1300 x 1321). Despite being the oldest essay in this collection, the publication in 2011 of a translation of Sanudo’s voluminous text by Peter Lock will have ensured that it remains valuable and relevant. It is of note that four of the five essays in this first section date to the 1980s. As Tyerman notes in his preface (p. vii), at that time it was not a widely held view that a great deal of conviction went into attempts to organise crusades after 1291. These articles helped to change that. Reading them in the present historiographical climate—one which emphasises the plurality and diversity of crusading history—underscores how relevant this work is for understanding how the scholarly debate on the nature of crusading has unfolded in the last few decades.