Since the publication of Heinrich von Sybel's Geschichte des ersten Kreuzzugs in 1841, partially translated into English by Lady Duff Gordon in 1861 within her compilation The History and Literature of the Crusades, the critical interrogation of literary texts has been at the heart of scholarly approaches to the crusading movement. This stems from the prevalence of ‘crusade texts’ in the medieval world; the expeditions associated with the crusading movement, particularly those to the East, are among the best evidenced events in the Middle Ages. For contemporaries, the cultural phenomenon of crusading, constantly adapting and shifting in definition and scope, was an attractive subject for oral, poetic, and literary composition. Thus, modern scholars of the crusades, following in the disciplinary footsteps of von Sybel, have been forced to engage with a daunting corpus of diverse accounts and responses to the blend of pilgrimage, holy war, and penitential activity which characterized the medieval crusading movement. But in the process of this, historians have often been guilty of inheriting elements of the same mid-nineteenth century theoretical approach – grounded in a dedication to empirical objectivity – determined to disregard elements of the text which are seemingly less useful for establishing the past, in von Sybel's mentor Leopold von Ranke's words, ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’, ‘as it essentially was’. Whole texts have been misguidedly excluded from the historiographical mainstream for decades on grounds of being ‘unreliable’. For this reason, an arbitrary methodological divide between ‘history’ and ‘literature’ has often been evident. Literary scholars have enthusiastically taken up the challenge of analyzing less prosaic texts neglected by historians, but, with some exceptions, their findings have been slow to be reincorporated into historical understanding of the crusading movement and its cultural significance. A further contributing factor in this process has been the divide imposed by the disciplinary categorization of vernacular languages into ‘national’ literatures, whilst Latin texts have been conceptually distanced from their context of vernacular accounts, with which they clearly interacted. This volume is, in large part, intended to redress these shortcomings.

It is not alone in so doing. Recent years have seen a significant growth in research which makes innovative inquiries of this extensive corpus of texts, poems, and songs as works of literature, with their own artistic and semiotic rationale, rather than as repositories of defective source material representing an external historical reality.