Crusades in Literature

Abstract

The crusades – specifically those focused on the recovery of Jerusalem – had a sustained impact on the literary culture of medieval England. While medieval France, Italy, and Germany produced far greater numbers of crusaders, a significant number of Englishmen participated in a variety of crusading campaigns as well, and the idea of crusading remained deeply important to the culture of medieval England for centuries after the collapse of the Latin Kingdom in the late thirteenth century. The popularity of the subject matter pervaded a wide variety of cultural registers, and, perhaps surprisingly, seems to have gained literary traction as the frequency of crusades to Jerusalem waned in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.