Gendering the Crusades.(Book Review)

ed. Susan B. Edgington and Sarah Lambert (Cardiff: U. of Wales P., 2001; pp. xvi + 215. 29.99 [pounds sterling]).

This useful and interesting collection of thirteen papers, many of them by younger scholars, addresses aspects of women's roles in the crusade movement, a topic that certainly merits greater attention than it has recently received. The title's reference to the 'gendering' of crusades is to some extent misleading; the collection is not primarily an exercise in the gender-theory approaches that literary scholars and those historians drawn to critical theory could apply to the materials for crusade history. That said, a number of contributions, for example …