Introduction

Using the history of the prominent statue of King Richard I ‘the Lionheart’ this section discusses the ways in which the memory of the crusades remain potent to the present. It establishes ‘crusader medievalism’ as a reception-historical term and the focus of this study before summarising the argument of the book: that crusading rhetoric and imagery enjoyed a mutually reinforcing relationship with key strands of nineteenth-century British culture and, once this had lost coherence with the disillusionment of the interwar years, that ideas of crusading and the crusades no longer enjoyed the cultural resonance and traction they had previously found.