Stephen Spencer

Emotions in a Crusading Context, 1095-1291

(Oxford University Press, 2020), 320 pp. $85.00

Stephen J. Spencer’s Emotions in a Crusading Context: 1095-1291 is part of Oxford University Press’ Emotions in History series. Spencer participates in a growing conversation about the history of emotions by explaining the various roles two emotions and one sentimental expression played in crusading chronicles: fear, anger, and weeping. Each of these is given a section comprised of two chapters and are examined throughout a wide primary source base of crusader chronicles written in either Latin or Old French. While most of his sources deal with the crusades in the Latin East, a significant portion of this work discusses other crusading locations such as Iberia, Southern France, and the Baltic. As the author notes, this work is the first in-depth study of emotionality in crusader texts. Although other scholars such as Jonathan Riley-Smith and Susanna Throop have respectively studied the ways love and vengeance served as motivations for crusaders, Spencer has taken one step further by analyzing the broad array of sentiments within crusader chronicles and puts them in direct conversation with the historiography of the emotional turn.[1] This book challenges a tendency of many crusader historians to treat the sentimentality within these chronicles as representative of the crusaders’ “lived feelings.” (1) Spencer instead aims to understand how emotions were represented in these texts, why chroniclers of the crusades used emotional rhetoric, if these crusading emotions changed over time, and whether the emotional norms in crusader histories differed substantially from other contemporary texts.

To answer these questions, Spencer employs a social-constructionist methodology to study emotions, rejecting the strict psychoanalytical argument that emotions are solely cognitive.  His definition of emotions as feelings whose evaluation and expression are “dependent on time and place,” (5) draws from Barbara Rosenwein’s work on medieval emotional history as well as Catherine Lutz’s research in cultural anthropology. Spencer’s work also relies on scholars of the ‘linguistic turn,’ such as Nancy Parker and Gabrielle Spiegel. To challenge Riley-Smith’s and other crusading historians’ assertions that the charters and chronicles of crusaders genuinely reflect their passions, Spencer deconstructs these Latin and Old-French documents and explores them as literary and historical objects, not as direct windows into the past.

The first chapter of this investigation looks at the intersection of fear of death and faith in crusader texts. Spencer notes that both “eyewitness” accounts like the Gesta Francorum and later chronicles such as William of Tyre’s Historia continuously tied crusaders’ faith in God to their lack of fear. While this trend remained consistent throughout both the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, crusader chroniclers did employ new ideas after the First Crusade. Works such as Bernard of Clairvaux’s description of the Templars and Henry of Livonia’s chronicle on the Baltic Crusades presented death in battle as a joyous occasion and an imitation of Jesus’ Passion. Spencer points out that these images of fear and fearlessness were crafted as explicit parallels to certain passages within scripture, especially the Books of Maccabees. Thus, crusader texts were influenced less by crusaders’ actual feelings in the heat of battle and more by the Bible’s lessons on fear that their authors would have been intimately familiar with.

Spencer moves on to look at other more secular forces behind the portrayal of fear in these sources. By comparing twelfth-century Latin histories of the crusades written by monks and clerics with the thirteenth-century vernacular histories of Geoffrey of Villehardouin and John of Joinville, both knights, Spencer illustrates how their chivalric culture led to an increased emphasis on fear as a source of shame. Chivalric romances did not make crusading knights see all responses to fear as cowardly, but it did lead them to view fear as an emasculating emotion. Spencer argues that on the occasions that chronicles justified crusaders’ fears, they did so under the influence of classical texts such as the Aeneid or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. These older works informed medieval writers to use a protagonist’s fear of betrayal to signal their enemies’ untrustworthy nature to the audience.

Chapter 3 discusses the relationship between faith and the shedding of tears in crusader chronicles, linking these sentimental representations to broader theological conversations occurring at the time. As early as the sixth century, the writings of Saint Benedict and Pope Gregory the Great presented tears as the visible signs of genuine contrition to God. Spencer argues this is the reason why narrations of crusaders shedding tears bear a similarity to descriptions of former sinners joining monastic orders. Other religious writings such as pilgrims’ accounts and hagiographies also gave chroniclers a template to present crusaders as pilgrims and imitators of Christ. Spencer believes these resemblances occurred due to a need to make the crusades appealing to monastic readers, but it is worth considering if this instead arose from the crusaders’ sincere beliefs.

Not all tears in crusader texts held religious significance according to Spencer. Investigating tears’ role in describing crusaders’ fraternal love, nobility, masculinity, and grief, he locates the social value of crusader tears. Utilizing the research of emotional historian William Reddy and crusades scholar Marcus Bull, Spencer argues that acts of communal weeping in crusader texts for dead comrades were attempts by writers to underscore the crusaders’ fraternal love and unity of purpose, not their actual sadness for the deceased. Aristocratic norms also made weeping a recognized prerequisite for requesting assistance, explaining why so many petitions for crusading were interlaced with mentions of tears. Likewise, allusions to crusaders’ “manful tears” fit in line with knightly ideas as numerous chivalric poems used tears to point to the protagonist’s masculine feelings. Spencer claims that even depictions of grieving in crusader chronicles served a social role, as they helped chroniclers establish an individual’s or a movement’s power. The great melancholy amongst Frederick Barbarossa’s troops following his death allowed German authors such as Arnold of Lübeck to present the drowned emperor as the greatest of all three rulers to participate in the Third Crusade. Robert the Monk’s depiction of formerly joyful Muslims turn to tears following their defeat at the Battle of Ascalon helped him present the newly established Kingdom of Jerusalem as a mighty and stable power.

In the book’s final section, both chapters challenge the general agreement amongst historians that the crusades lent themselves to an atmosphere of righteous anger. Chapter 5 investigates instances of legitimate anger in crusader chronicles, first finding that such instances are rarer than previous scholars have suggested given that the Latin word zelus had multiple meanings not tied to anger. Nonetheless, Spencer finds an uptick in written descriptions of justified vengeance and anger starting in the Third Crusade and continuing throughout the thirteenth century. While Spencer supports Throop’s contention on this one point, he argues that this shift is tied to kingship, not to the crusades. Spencer makes this claim by comparing depictions of Richard the Lionheart’s fury in Anglo-Norman accounts of the Third Crusade with other portrayals of ira regis in various royal chronicles such as Otto of Freising’s Gesta Friderici and Rigord’s Gesta Philippi Augusti. Chapter 6 shows that both crusading histories and contemporary texts also held similar opinions about nonroyal anger, viewing it as a fundamentally dangerous force. The first generation of crusader chroniclers presented the failure of the so-called “People’s Crusade” as a natural result of the peasants’ bestial anger. Later writers such as thirteenth-century Matthew Paris would continue to correlate crusader anger to a fatal lack of discipline amongst the ranks. Seeing the discord generated by both anger and fury as fatal to the crusading movement, its chroniclers and apologists taught future crusaders to practice self-control and patience instead.

Spencer ends his work with a summary of his work and three overarching conclusions. First, a methodological approach which deals with textual representation and functionality is better suited toward studying emotions in crusader texts than seeing these representations as past crusaders’ actual feelings. Secondly, the crusaders did not create entirely new emotional norms; instead, their chroniclers engaged with contemporary medieval ideas about sentimentality. Finally, the numerous roles emotionality played in the crusades undercuts any notion that medieval people were somehow emotionally immature or childlike. Spencer argues that while medieval emotional performances might be drastically different from our modern sensibilities, they were still complex social tools. In short, medieval emotions must be treated “on their own terms.” (250)

This work demonstrates the importance of emotional history to the study of the crusades. Spencer challenges numerous assumptions about the crusades and exposes the complexity of crusader chronicles. If future researchers still hope to locate the authentic feelings experienced by crusaders during the heat of battle, they must first carefully consider this book’s arguments.

Patrick Eickman
University of Wisconsin-Madison
[email protected]

[1] Jonathan Riley-Smith, “Crusading as an Act of Love,” History 65, no. 214 (1980): 177-192 and Susanna Throop, “Zeal, Anger and Vengeance: The Emotional Rhetoric of Crusading,” in Vengeance in the Middle Ages: Emotion, Religion and Feud, ed. Susanna Throop and Paul Hyams (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2010), 177-201.