In recent years, scholars have become increasingly interested in tracing the cultural imprints left by the Crusades on medieval European societies. An important element of this, championed by scholars, including (among others) Simon Parsons, Linda Paterson, and Carol Sweetenham, has been to foreground the role and significance of vernacular chanson and lyric responses. It is within this trend, therefore, that we can situate Maria Galvez's The Subject of Crusade, which considers the role and function of crusade lyrics (as well as the material cultures related to the contexts of their emergence) from c .1150 to 1300 (with a passing glance at the fifteenth century), and argues for the creation of a “courtly crusade idiom” (2) that provides a more complex insight into the reality of how participants sought to conceive of the relationship between this religious-penitential movement and ideals of courtliness and chivalry.

The first chapter thus considers how lyrical descriptions of crusaders leaving their heart behind for their ladies corresponded with ecclesiastical ideals of sacrifice, confession, and right intent. In this, the pious sacrifice emphasized by figures like Bernard of Clairvaux and Pope Innocent III as central to achieving crusading's spiritual rewards, as well as contemporary theological discussions regarding the performance and interpretation of repentance, are met by ideas of earthly (and bodily) sacrifice and manifestations of penitential intent expressed and debated through dialogue with a lover. Galvez continues the discussion of conversations surrounding separation and departure in the second chapter, which focuses on Middle High German and Occitan lyrics. Here she notes that German lyrics offer more philosophical, varied, and at times conflicted considerations of the intersection between devotion, love, and crusade, whereas Occitan lyrics are similarly varied but instead rely on metaphors of movement (linked to ideas of the crusade as a pilgrim journey) to express attitudes toward departure. The third chapter, meanwhile, turns to romance—which carries many of the same tensions regarding departure, absence, and right intent found in the lyrics— and to the role of the female voice in expressing ideas of protest against the crusading movement. Chapter 4 is rather more focused, homing in on the figure of Lancelot as an unrepentant crusader in the early thirteenth-century romance known as Perlesvaus. Here, rather than simply embodying the idealized courtly crusader, Lancelot's steadfast defense of his loving Guinevere demonstrates further the tension between earthly allegiance and crusading spirituality, as, despite professing enthusiasm for performing crusading penance (and his belief in its redemptive power), he shows distinct ambivalence toward internal contrition. In the fifth chapter Galvez introduces the material element, ostensibly by examining how manuscripts containing crusading lyrics served to construct certain images of crusader-poets, albeit with asides—aimed at setting out the theoretical frameworks of the chapter—on Jean d'Alluye's well-known “Oriental” sword and a funerary epigraph from Frankish Tyre. Central to this chapter are three key concepts: adjacency, genre-existence, and performative reconfigurations. Galvez considers adjacency, or nearness, through the collation of Thibaut of Champagne's crusade lyrics alongside other related texts or sources and how this built a broader picture of the crusading lord for the reader(s). She shows genre-existence through the genre-spanning works of Raimbaut de Vaqueiras and the construction of the—at times varied depending on the manuscript—image of a multifaceted troubadour-crusader-vassal. Finally, she discusses performative reconfigurations through a demonstration of how both Jehan de Journi of Cyprus's confractural use of French prayers in a wider penitential composition produced in Frankish Outremer and the Templar of Tyre's use of the lyrical style when criticizing secular society help to reveal how the meanings and roles of such performative forms (like the identities of their performers) can be reconfigured by their geographical setting. Finally, chapter six jumps forward chronologically to examine the so-called Feast of the Pheasant, a banquet held by Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, in 1454 to launch a crusade against the Ottoman Turks. Here Galvez argues that the lavish, worldly performance embodied in this feast, like the lyrics discussed in earlier chapters, reveals—though its multimedia crusader representations of the ancient Greek hero Jason—an underlying and enduring resistance to penitence, even while promoting spiritual warfare.

Overall, this is an interesting work, if not always analytically or methodologically convincing, valuable for its engagement with source bases yet to be fully mined for their insights. There are some negatives, though. For instance, the use of endnotes and the lack of a bibliography hamper its use as a work of reference. It is also somewhat disappointing that, while Galvez engages with some crusades scholarship, this sometimes appears to have a limited thematic and temporal focus, such that recent studies on crusader spirituality and the emotional communities that emerged around the movement are all absent, despite their distinct potential for adding greater texture to the arguments she advances: William Purkis, Crusading Spirituality in the Holy Land and Iberia, c.1095–c.1187 (2008); Susanna Throop, Crusading as an Act of Vengeance, 1095–1216 (2011); Stephen Spencer, Emotions in a Crusading Context, 1095–1291 (2019); and, more surprisingly, William Jackson's Ardent Complaints and Equivocal Piety: The Portrayal of the Crusader in Medieval German Poetry (2003) and his comparative article on women in German and French crusade lyrics (“Poet, Woman, and Crusade in Songs of Marcabru, Guiot de Dijon, and Albrecht von Johansdorf,” Mediaevalia 22, no. 2 [1999]: 265–89). Likewise, it might have been interesting for Galvez to problematize a little more the apparent differentiation between “ecclesiastical” and “secular” spheres, which sits at the heart of The Subject of Crusade, particularly in light of the work of Sweetenham and other scholars on how even the earliest crusading narratives emerged from oral “campfire” cultures and were deeply influenced by vernacular and epic traditions, and to resist the urge to largely isolate the lyrics discussed here from the myriad other forms of storytelling that surrounded these expeditions and that the singers—as Galvez admits—would have known. This is especially important because, at its roots, Galvez does not necessarily create an entirely new conception of crusading, as she suggests; rather, her book serves to reiterate and complement the voices of those scholars who have already stressed the need to trace the cultural imprint of crusading not simply in the ecclesiastical efforts to define the movement, but in the responses produced by, for, and in dialogue with those societies expected to participate.