The Routledge Handbook of Crusade Texts, Images and Artefacts

The Routledge Handbook of Crusade Texts, Images, and Artefacts presents a diverse array of “entry point” chapters, commissioned from an international group of experts at the forefront of their respective subfields, which together offer the reader a way in to the modern study of materials relating to the medieval crusades. It traces recent methodological, conceptual, and disciplinary revolutions in the way that scholars approach such materials, and responds to a field in flux: where vastly more “texts” (broadly defined) are now being unearthed, edited, translated, and otherwise made available to ever wider audiences, and where radical new perspectives and insights are emerging from a dynamic and growing field of scholarship. Studies of iconography, manuscript transmission, and preaching materials sit alongside those on historical writing in the Levant, memories of anti-Jewish violence in the Rhineland, and Middle High German lyric in this wide-ranging volume. Both experienced researchers and students new to the field will benefit from this collection of recent overviews to support their own research, and medievalists of all kinds will find the mix of “state-of-the-field” synopses, illustrative case studies, and interventions into historiographical debate, rewarding and insightful.