Medieval History Writing and Crusading Ideology

Just to give readers a notice, a new book on the Crusades has recently come out:

Medieval History Writing and Crusading Ideology
Edited by Tuomas M.S. Lehtonen and Kurt Villads Jensen
Published by the Finnish Literature Society in 2005.

Synopsis: This book examines how the crusading ideology was formulated in medieval historiography and how the crusading movement affected Christianity and the world beyond. The second main theme is the spread of the crusading movement to Northern Europe, especially Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea area. Northerners not only participated in the crusades in the Holy Land, but also learned and were inspired to create and take part in a new crusading movement within the Baltic Sea region itself. The relationship between the crusades to Jerusalem and those in the North must be of fundamental importance to understanding the dynamics that created history, both locally and in a general European context, but this relation itself has seldom been the object of thoroughgoing research; on the contrary, the considerable scholarship on both the North and the South has been pursued in isolation. Divided into three parts, this volume opens with the different forms of and reactions to the crusading ideology. The importance of ideology as a driving motivation for the crusaders has again been recognised in international studies since the 1970s, and its impact is also now felt in Scandinavian research environments. The second part moves on to examine the crusading ideology and its impact upon society in a broader context through its relation to violence, its portrayal of the enemies, and its representations in the policy and construction of the Danish crown and royal mythology. The Northern Crusades in the Baltic Sea region are discussed in the third part as seen through contemporary sources and modern historical writing. This also includes dealing with some of the impacts of the Crusades in Russia and even farther east in Mongolia. The essays in this section show how the general idea of crusading was applied to the Northern areas and frequently resembles in its details the Mediterranean crusades, as well as demonstrate how Scandinavian scholars have often neglected this aspect in modern history writing.


For De Re readers: The book has 22 essays, most of which focus on the Middle East, but with several that deal with Scandinavia. None of them are straightforward military papers, but anything on the Crusades usually touches on warfare. A couple of papes worth looking at include "Why Did Medieval Norsemen Go on Crusade?' by Arnved Nedkvitne, "A New Norse Knighthood? The Impact of the Templars in Late-Twelfth-century Norway," by Bjorn Bandlien, "Crusading at the Fringe of the Ocean: Denmark and Portugal in the Twelfth Century," by Kurt Villads Jensen, and "The Crusaders and the Mongols : The Case of the First Crusade of Louis IX (1248-1254)," by Antti Ruotsala.