Reviewed by: Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative Christopher Tyerman Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative. By Suzanne M. Yeager. [Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, Vol. 72.] (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2008. Pp. x, 255. $99.00. ISBN 978-0-521-87792-3.) In this stimulating, clever, and alert study of an apparently disparate group of more or less familiar late-medieval texts, Suzanne M. Yeager seeks to demonstrate how various images of Jerusalem were deployed in creating a new “perception of English political authority and religious morality” (p. 2), contributing to the formation of a distinctive “English nationhood” by providing “images of England’s sacral identity” (p. 172). The texts are analyzed in five discrete sections that follow the different roles played by the Holy City in literary imagination and devotional habit. Jerusalem as a terrestrial goal of pilgrimage is explored through an anonymous English Itinerarium describing a pilgrimage of 1344–45 and the pilgrim accounts of William Wey and Richard Torkington. The fourteenth-century poem Richard, Coer de Lyon holds up Jerusalem as a target for a national crusade, while the Middle English romance The Siege of Jerusalem uses it as a metaphor for an internal spiritual journey, a “crusade of the soul” (p. 78). The English versions of The Book of Sir John Mandeville portray Jerusalem as a national aspiration, an “English inheritance” (p. 109). Cumulatively, these texts contribute to the conversion of England itself into a Holy Land, a theme pursued in the final section on the English translation The Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode, the French Cistercian Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pe`lerinage de la vie humaine, and Philippe de Mézières’s La Songe du Vieil Pèlerin and Epistre au Roi Richard. This section emphasizes a distinctive English tradition of crusading, where Jerusalem is taken as a symbol of international [End Page 323] peace attainable only when spiritual grace has been achieved through the establishment of harmony and unity in a Western Christendom riven by the Hundred Years War and the Great Schism, a sort of geopolitical communitas to match the personal communitas of Holy Land pilgrims discussed in the first section. Despite his promotion of images of the Passion that, Yeager argues, acted as conveyances for Jerusalem symbolism, Mézières’s works sit oddly with the other, more obviously English texts, the discussion here providing nothing new nor even encompassing some obvious recent work by historians. Yeager’s analysis of each text, while not entirely free from the opacity of the vocabulary of theory, is nuanced and detailed, at times too much so, obscuring the general relevance of the argument to the main themes, as is seen in the prolix account of Richard I’s cannibalism. Some tricks are missed. Although competition with the French runs as a constant partner to the specifically English discourse, the extent of official manipulation of Jerusalem motifs to combat French attacks precisely on English lack of crusade commitment could usefully have been incorporated. Closer comparison with current studies on continental pilgrim narratives, such as those by Felix Fabri, would have confirmed the protean nature and use of such books. Despite some impressive manuscript detection, clearer evidence for the extent and nature of the audience for these works would have lent weight to the significance of Yeager’s theories. Greater emphasis on the venerable literary, liturgical, and historical tradition of associating Jerusalem with the stage for the Apocalypse would have provided a longer perspective. Mention of related sermons by John Bromyard or the crusade language of chroniclers such as Henry Knighton might have provided supportive or contrasting context. More seriously, although Yeager’s thesis is convincing, full of fresh insights, and in tune with much recent related scholarship, there are absences, omissions, and insecurities that undermine some of her conclusions, especially in regard to the asserted novelty in the texts she describes. Much of this derives from an uneven grasp of historical context, which may be understandable in a literary scholar, but unfortunate in an overtly historicist work offering a direct historical agenda. A few examples will suffice. To argue (p. 100) that after 1187 English sermons on the sins of the laity increased ignores the...