Writing the Early Crusades: Text, Transmission and Memory

A pioneering approach to contemporary historical writing on the First Crusade, looking at the texts as cultural artefacts rather than simply for the evidence they contain.

The First Crusade (1095-1101) was the stimulus for a substantial boom in Western historical writing in the first decades of the twelfth century, beginning with the so-called "eyewitness" accounts of the crusade and extending to numerous second-hand treatments in prose and verse. From the time when many of these accounts we...