Stephen Spencer

The Third Crusade (1187–1192) is renowned as a conflict between King Richard I of England and the Muslim Sultan Saladin—a reductionist perspective that reflects an enduring fascination with these protagonists both inside and outside academia. In fact, the expedition was significantly more diverse, with the German emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, and the king of France, Philip Augustus, leading major contingents to the East, while a number of smaller-scale expeditions also constituted part of the overall Third Crusade. This article surveys key developments in the enterprise's historiography—focusing primarily on the crusading careers of Richard, Frederick and Philip—and introduces the main sources. It suggests that hindsight has played a surprisingly prominent role in directing scholarly interpretations and that historiography has gradually diversified during the 20th and 21st centuries, moving away from the traditional Richard versus Saladin narrative to explore understudied individuals, events and themes.

Special issue of The Journal of Religious History, Literature and Culture 5/2 (2019).

This article explores the gendered presentation of the First Crusade and the establishment of the Latin East in Book 4 of William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum. Building upon the seminal work of Kirsten Fenton, it argues that William’s preoccupation with masculinity, and specifically his intention of pitching the First Crusade as a model of male fortitude for future generations, had a far greater impact on his account of events in Outremer than has yet been acknowledged. The use of gendered language in Book 4 of the Gesta regum is considered first, before exploring two ways in which this concern for gender shaped William’s portrayal of events in the East: namely, the paucity of references to both deserters and instances of Latin fear. The article ends with a comparative case study, analysing how William approached his principal source for King Baldwin I of Jerusalem’s career to determine whether his omission of Latin fear was a deliberate narrative strategy. In so doing, this article seeks to advance our understanding of William’s account of the First Crusade and the early years of Latin settlement, which remains relatively understudied due to his lack of eyewitness credentials, and to contribute to the growing corpus of scholarship on the gendered presentation of crusading in historical narratives.

This article seeks to shed light on the literary agenda of Odo of Deuil, author of the most detailed Latin account of the Levantine branch of the Second Crusade. It calls for scholars to reinstate Odo’s vilification of the Byzantines as a primary, rather than secondary, objective and proposes a new explanation for his stringent anti-Greek tone. It first extends our knowledge of Odo’s engagement with the historiographical tradition of the First Crusade, before drawing attention to a hitherto unappreciated layer in his vilification of the Byzantines: his use of emotional language.

This article draws attention to two unexplored witnesses to Ralph of Coggeshall’s Chronicon Anglicanum in London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 371, which are important evidence for the reception of the Chronicon in medieval England and its role in shaping monastic interpretations of Richard I’s reign, particularly his crusading career.

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Historians have almost universally characterised King Richard I of England, otherwise known as ‘the Lionheart’, as an intemperate hothead, whose anger was both uncontrollable and socially dysfunctional. This article seeks to test the evidential foundations of this longstanding view, and to explain its genesis, by analysing descriptions of Richard I’s anger in the narratives of the Third Crusade—narratives which have been foundational in formulating such assessments. It does not argue that Richard was a meek or tranquil king, or even that he was always in control of his passions. Rather, it contends that there exists a disparity between how most medieval chroniclers perceived Richard’s wrath and the evaluations of modern historians. The main conclusion reached is that the nature of the source material, which was not only polarised between the king’s supporters and detractors but also witnessed the incorporation of legendary material from an early stage, curtails any attempt to reconstruct the ‘reality’ of Richard’s temperament. After mapping the evolution of attitudes towards anger in the Middle Ages and scrutinising the twelfth- and thirteenth-century narrative accounts of the Lionheart’s wrath, the article seeks to explain why scholars have persisted in casting Richard as an individual who was unusually susceptible to irrational fits of rage and, in so doing, calls for greater sensitivity to the role of memory in future studies of medieval emotions.

This article explores the role and significance of emotions in the Historia Ierosolimitana attributed to Albert of Aachen, long recognised as one of the most detailed and colourful histories of the First Crusade and the early years of Latin settlement in the East. Rather than attempting to reconstruct the crusaders’ lived passions, it analyses the comments the author made about emotions and the ways in which emotion terms functioned in his history. It will be argued that emotions interacted with, and helped to communicate, a number of key themes in Albert’s Historia, three of which are discussed here: crusader piety; Christian brotherhood; and power. At the same time, through a comparison with contemporaneous narratives of the First Crusade, it will be suggested that the emotional content of Albert’s Historia is not without historical value, for it offers a window onto wider social and cultural conceptions of emotions in the twelfth century.

Over thirty years ago, Jonathan Riley-Smith demonstrated how crusading was preached and conceived as an act of Christian charity, encompassing both the love of God and love of neighbour. By analysing representations of fear and weeping in the Latin narratives of the First Crusade, this article argues that a broader spectrum of emotions and emotional displays functioned as markers of crusader spirituality. It firstly suggests that, rather than fearing death, the ideal miles Christi discernible in the sources unreservedly placed his hope in God and, in several of the texts, unflinchingly accepted martyrdom in imitation of Christ. It then explores depictions of weeping as an expression of crusader piety, focusing specifically on tears shed over Jerusalem.