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Rewriting the First Crusade: Epistolary Culture in the Middle Ages

Rewriting the First Crusade (Dr. Tom Smith)

  • Date26 April 2024

The letters stemming from the First Crusade are premier sources for understanding the launch, campaign, and aftermath of the expedition. Instead, Smith argues that some letters are post-hoc ‘inventions’.

Crusades

Between 1095 and 1100, epistles sustained social relationships across the Mediterranean and within Europe, as a mixture of historical writing, literary invention, news, and theological interpretation. They served ecclesiastical administration, projected authority, and formed focal points for spiritual commemoration and para-liturgical campaigns.

This paper argues that some of the letters are post hoc "inventions", composed by generations of scribe-readers who visited crusading sites from the twelfth century on, adding new layers of meaning in the form of interpolations and post-scripts. Drawing upon this new understanding, and blurring the distinction of epistolary "reality", it rewrites central aspects of the history of the First Crusade, considering the documents in a new way: as markers of enthusiasm and support for the crusade movement among monastic clergy, who copied and consumed them as a form of scribal crusading. Whether authentic letters or literary "confections", they functioned as communal sites for the celebration, commemoration and memorialisation of the expedition.

Book here: https://www.sas.ac.uk/events/rewriting-first-crusade-epistolary-culture-middle-ages

Book launch: following the paper, in-person attendees will have the opportunity to purchase hardback copies of Rewriting the First Crusade: Epistolary Culture in the Middle Ages(Opens in new window), due to be published by Boydell in April, at the special promotional price of £35 (RRP £70; cash or bank transfer only).

Dr Tom Smith is a History tutor at Rugby School; he is also an Honorary Research Associate of the History Department, Royal Holloway, University of London. As well the book above, he is the author of:

Curia and Crusade: Pope Honorius III and the Recovery of the Holy Land, 1216–1227 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), the co-editor of numerous essay collections, including: Communicating Papal Authority in the Middle Ages (ed. with Minoru Ozawa and Georg Strack) (London: Routledge, 2023) and Chronicle, Crusade, and the Latin East: Essays in Honour of Susan B. Edgington (ed. with Andrew D. Buck) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022). He is the author of many chapters in edited collections, as well as multiple periodical articles in journals including: al-Masaq, Viator, Traditio, Crusades, Journal of Medieval History.

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