This is a very important and profoundly scholarly book by a distinguished historian. It is important for, broadly, the following reasons:
* It brings to light a great quantity of important source material hitherto largely ignored.* It reinforces the message, already made by others such as N. Housley, that the crusades did not end in 1291 and continued to be a great preoccupation of Europeans throughout the Middle Ages and, indeed, beyond.* It makes clear how central the crusade was to the spiritual concerns of medieval people.* It analyses the corpus, exploring, documenting, and explaining the changes made in the material over the period.
The study of crusader liturgy has never been entirely ignored and the author of the present work has published substantially on the subject. The work of C. Maier on crusader preaching has always recognised the importance of liturgical celebration, while there are a few specialist studies. Certainly in his bibliography and footnotes Linder acknowledges this and other material. [[1]] But this work by Linder is on an entirely different scale and dwarfs all that has gone before because he has unearthed an amazing quantity of material. His careful and prolonged exploration of the archives of Europe and elsewhere have exposed, as he enumerates the material (363): "Three Clamors, eight converted Masses, ten triple Mass sets, forty-five dedicated War Masses, the English Trental of St Gregory in its numerous versions, and twenty-two bidding prayers." The 'clamor' owes much to earlier models and is the simplest of these materials, with the earliest dating from just after 1187, but the subsequent elaboration of all kinds of liturgical celebration was on a hitherto unsuspected scale. Moreover, it is evident that these celebrations involved secular and monastic clergy, including the Military Orders, and the laity with some of the material being in the vernacular.
Crusading had its place in the liturgy soon after the First Crusade, but this assumed the enormous proportions unearthed by Linder really after the events of 1291 when its elaboration and development was the object of much scholarship and ingenuity. Linder has brought before us this huge range of crusading material whose evaluation and assimilation into the body of scholarship will take years. But certain aspects of its importance are immediately obvious. For a long time 1291 was really considered 'The End of Crusading,' and, indeed, there are still plenty of books about which use that date as a convenient terminus. The scholar who, more than any other, has been responsible for disabusing us of this view, is Norman Housley, whose magisterial Later Crusades, has really defined the field. [[2]] Linder's extensive travels and careful research has revealed a vast quantity of material which was constantly changed and developed across the later Middle Ages, supporting Housley's notion of the crusade as a continuing and living thing.
Further, the book shows how central crusading was to medieval spirituality. The prayers and masses which Linder discusses come from all over the Catholic West and clearly impinged on the religious practices of all. The papacy certainly played a major role in promulgating such practices, as when, in 1322, Pope John XXII introduced a sequence of three votive masses to support a crusade to help Cyprus and Armenia, but this material was the work of many minds in all parts of the Catholic world devoted to the liberation of Jerusalem. If the scale and elaboration of the material is self-evident, Linder is right to be cautious about how effective it was. The very existence of this body of material shows us that Jerusalem mattered to people, but how far it was effective in moving them to do something about their concerns is a different matter. Indeed, it is possible that such religious exercises constituted displacement activity--indulgence in a pietistic form as a substitute for action. However, the analysis of citations of the St Gregory Trental in English Wills, in itself a fascinating piece of research, is evidence of how far Jerusalem bore upon the minds of men and women.
Linder has done much more than merely catalogue a mass of material--though that would be important in itself. He has also traced its changes, evolution and development, with a remarkable display of textual criticism. The analysis of the 'Clementine set' and its transformations is a tour de force showing a masterly grasp of detail and an ability to relate it to wider ends. This is scholarship in whose integrity one can have every confidence. The book is very well produced. It has a series of Indices which are vital to its use: in themselves they represent a powerful testimony to Linder's careful and systematic methods. There are some splendid color plates and useful black and white renditions of manuscripts, all carefully related to text. Overall this is that rare thing--the revelation of a new body of source material. But Linder has not stopped at mere revelation: his exploration and analysis are remarkable. This is a truly important book which will be of value to generations of historians, and not merely historians of the crusades.
NOTES:
[[1]] C.T. Maier, Preaching the Crusades: mendicant Friars and the Cross in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); J. France, "The Text of the Account of the Capture of Jerusalem in the Ripoll Manuscript, Bibliotheque Nationale (Latin) 5132," English Historical Review 103 (1988), 658-67.
[[2]] N. Housley, The Later Crusades. From Lyons to Alcazar 1274-1580 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). This is the most important of Housley's many works on the crusade in the later Middle Ages.