Women of the Crusades: The Constructedness of the Female Other, 1100–1200

Abstract

ABSTRACT Histories of the Crusades have moved away from characterising the conflict as a civilisational clash between Christianity and Islam, highlighting instead the porousness of religious and geopolitical boundaries in Iberia and the Levant. Yet twelfth-century sources in Old French and Arabic rarely present such a nuanced view outright. Reflecting on the constructedness of the motif of the female Other, I argue that these texts enacted and reinforced a Christian–Muslim dualism in the face of contrary realities of coexistence, fascination and even temptation. Religious difference was constructed and reconstructed through the prism of racial forms, thus facilitating the perpetuation of military conflict. In particular, the motif of the white, sensual Christian woman was used to exclude the enemy in repeated attempts to construct a coherent in-group identity that was, for all that, under constant threat of destabilisation.