ABSTRACT

The romance was the prominent form of narrative fiction in Western Europe from the later Middle Ages into the Renaissance, so it is perhaps unsurprising that this fluid genre, encompassing stories of conquest, adventure, or aristocratic love in the vernacular, engaged with another broadly influential cultural practice: crusading.1 Nonetheless, the extent of this engagement and its implications for our understanding of the literary and historical past has only begun to be explored. While the romance’s impact in the medieval period has long been acknowledged, current studies have started to elucidate the genre’s continuing vitality in the early modern period by eschewing restrictive notions of literary worth and by examining how such works could reinforce, appropriate, or challenge cultural norms. Crusading also has received renewed scholarly attention, which has provided a fuller picture of its effects on various aspects of cultural production, including art, trade, liturgy, preaching, and history, as well as of its range, which extended from more familiar military campaigns to capture Jerusalem to smaller expeditions or individual journeys in Iberia, Italy, and the Baltic.2 Furthermore, crusading activity and discourse continued well into the Renaissance despite the challenges of the Protestant Reformation to papal authority. In the early modern period crusading practices and narratives were adapted to describe the conflicts with the powerful Ottoman Turks and to construct a Christian or European identity, indicating how modernity is less of a decisive break with the medieval past than is typically understood and reflected in academic period boundaries.3 In other words, in the medieval and early modern periods the memory of crusading-including celebrated ancestors, devotional obligations, claims to dominion, and a conceptual framework opposing Christian to non-Christian-remained central to the ecclesiastical institution as well as to crusading’s popular refractions. Further investigation of the evolving relationship between romances and crusading can benefit historical and literary studies by showing how vernacular literature can transmit particular kinds of group memories, not

necessarily statically or uncritically, and how those memories can influence political action or individual behavior.