Crusading and Masculinities

This volume presents the first substantial exploration of crusading and masculinity, focusing on the varied ways in which the symbiotic relationship between the two was made manifest in a range of medieval settings and sources, and to what ends. Ideas about masculinity formed an inherent part of the mindset of societies in which crusading happened, and of the conceptual framework informing both those who recorded the events and those who participated. Examination and interrogation of these ideas enables a better contextualised analysis of how those events were experienced, comprehended and portrayed. The collection is structured around five themes: sources and models; contrasting masculinities; emasculation and transgression; masculinity and religiosity and kingship and chivalry. By incorporating masculinity within their analysis of the crusades and of crusaders the contributors demonstrate how such approaches greatly enhance our understanding of crusading as an ideal, an institution and an experience. Individual essays consider western campaigns to the Middle East and Islamic responses; events and sources from the Iberian peninsula and Prussia are also interrogated and re-examined, thus enabling cross-cultural comparison of the meanings attached to medieval manhood. The collection also highlights the value of employing gender as a vital means of assessing relationships between different groups of men, whose values and standards of behaviour were socially and culturally constructed in distinct ways.

Natasha R. Hodgson is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History and Director of the CSRC at Nottingham Trent. She wrote Women, Crusading and the Holy Land and is completing Gender and the Crusades for Palgrave Macmillan. She edits Routledge series’ Advances in Crusades Research and Themes in Medieval and Early Modern History and co-edits the journal, Nottingham Medieval Studies.

Katherine J. Lewis is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Huddersfield. She researches later medieval religious and cultural history. She has published on hagiography and saints’ cults (especially St Katherine of Alexandria), on medieval women, and on masculinity, including Kingship and Masculinity in Late Medieval England.

Matthew M. Mesley is an Associate Lecturer at Bath Spa University and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield. He was formerly a SNSF postdoc at the University of Zurich. His chapter "Chivalry, Masculinity and Sexuality", is published in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the Crusades.