That Jerusalem was central to medieval political and religious thought is widely known; it was (and remains) a holy city to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, was sought after by empires, crusaders, and pilgrims, and stood at the geographical (and geopolitical) center of many medieval maps. Yet the full range and impact of this centrality has not been sufficiently accounted for in scholarship focusing on medieval narrative texts, a deficit that Prof. Yeager's study makes considerable progress toward redressing. Focusing primarily on English works, Yeager considers a wide range of texts, including first-person accounts of pilgrimage, crusading literature, romances, and devotional writing.
Chapter 1 is a study of accounts of pilgrimage from three authors: the anonymous fourteenth-century author of Itinerarium cuiusdam Anglici, 1344–45; William Wey, who wrote several “user-friendly” travel itineraries in the mid-fifteenth century; and Richard Torkington, who wrote Diarie of Englysshe Travell early in the sixteenth century. While choosing one work each from three consecutive centuries does not provide a sufficiently broad background to document how pilgrim narratives changed more broadly across this chronological span, the tradeoff is that the reader benefits from Yeager's nuanced observations of both the similarities and differences in how pilgrim writers represented Jerusalem—as both a physical and spiritual destination—to readers back home in England.
The second, third, and fourth chapters each focus on a representative text that offers insight into the variety of ways that medieval authors negotiated and understood the complex historical relationship—whether real or legendary—between England and Jerusalem. The subject of chapter 2 is Richard, Coer de Lyon, a crusading poem surviving in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century versions that relates (and sought to reinvent) England's role in the Third Crusade. Yeager's analysis of the poem demonstrates both how Jerusalem was imagined as an object of crusader zeal in medieval England (and western Europe more broadly) and how the poem's depiction of Jerusalem as the rightful inheritance of the English during the crusades of the twelfth century mapped onto the current events of the Hundred Years' War and England's claims to rightful ownership of French territory.
Chapter 3 focuses on The Siege of Jerusalem, a fourteenth-century alliterative poem that has recently been the subject of increasing critical attention after years of neglect. Part of a large body of literature known as the Vengeance of Our Lord tradition, the poem anachronistically re-imagines the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in a.d. 70, portraying the Roman soldiers as chivalric Christian knights besieging Jerusalem and destroying the Jewish temple in an act of retribution for the crucifixion of Christ. Yeager's “counter-reading” of the poem, a typological reading that argues that the Romans “become the adversaries of Christendom” while the Jewish victims “occupy a martyr-like role as Christians” (107), will likely fail to convince many critics who have struggled with what most see as the poem's overt anti-Semitism, but her argument is a thoughtful and welcome addition to an emerging scholarly discussion that seeks to deepen our collective understanding of the poem through mapping the complex textual, historical, and political traditions to which it is connected.
Chapter 4 centers on The Book of Sir John Mandeville, a book of purported travels that is famous both for the wide diversity of source materials that its author subsumed within it and its wide dissemination throughout medieval Europe in a number of translations. Although the diverse receptions of the book mirrored its many sources, Yeager focuses on the book's “reception as a devotional narrative,” especially by English audiences, in keeping with the goals of her study (108). Having considered narratives of crusades and pilgrimages to what she terms “Terrestrial Jerusalem,” along with a narrative of its destruction, Yeager here develops more fully the theme of a parallel “Celestial Jerusalem,” which has been acknowledged throughout the book even when discussing texts that deal with the actual, earthly Jerusalem.
The final chapter concerns a cluster of texts that demonstrate the “interrelationship between politics, practical warfare, and medieval Christian theology,” including Guillaume de Deguileville's Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (including its translation into Middle English), The Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode, and Philippe de Mézières' Songe du Viel Pèlerin and Epistre au Roi Richard (136). As suggested in the chapter's title—“Beyond the Celestial and Terrestrial Jerusalem: the Promised Land in western Christendom”—it examines how the rhetoric of crusading and pilgrimage literature were used to recast both England and France as Promised Lands in the west. Yeager shows that the holy city can be the object of travelers' spiritual itineraries even if they never leave home, and documents how Jerusalem remained central to medieval devotional thought well after any realistic hopes of possessing it though military actions had passed.
There is much to admire in this monograph, which covers a lot of ground succinctly and thoughtfully in the 172 pages that contain the introduction, chapters, and conclusion. The detailed notes and comprehensive bibliography that constitute the rest of the book, meanwhile, attest to the extensive research and documentation behind Yeager's efforts, and they will serve as useful references to the many readers who will no doubt utilize her work to further their own research. This book offers much to those studying any of the works analyzed in detail within the chapters as well as to those who are interested more generally in pilgrimage, the crusades, or medieval devotional thought. It also plays an important role in bringing together scholarly discussions in these areas, which often remain much more separated from one another in modern scholarship than they were in medieval thought or practice (as demonstrated by the manifold intersections documented in this study). Finally, Yeager persuasively argues that narratives relating the quest for and conquering of Jerusalem were frequently instrumental in shaping how subsequent authors understood and related the events of later medieval history, including the Hundred Years' War and the Papal Schism. As such, these narratives deserve much more attention than they have received, and Yeager's work is an important contribution to their study.
