Crusading influenced many aspects of medieval life, and recent scholarship has increasingly examined women’s involvement in the movement. In this newest volume of Boydell’s “Crusading in Context” series, Gordon Reynolds focuses on the role of women in English crusading. The book comprises seven chapters divided into three parts—“Propaganda,” “Support,” and “Memory”—framed by an introduction, conclusion, and three appendices that enrich the wider argument. Together they trace how women in England encountered, supported, and remembered crusading, even when they did not physically participate in campaigns abroad.
The opening section lays the foundations for Reynolds’s broader study by exploring how women encountered crusading through everyday life and culture. The first chapter highlights the domestic and visual dimensions of crusade propaganda, noting that crusading permeated social conversation, art, and architecture. The second chapter explores papal efforts to broaden yet regulate crusading participation. While men were encouraged to take up arms, women were urged to remain behind and contribute financially. Reynolds offers an insightful discussion of vow redemption, where would-be crusaders substituted financial donations for personal service, arguing that this mechanism fostered a meaningful, if indirect, sense of involvement among women.
Chapter 3 traces evolving clerical attitudes toward women in crusade preaching from the twelfth to the thirteenth century. Reynolds deftly navigates the limited evidence for sermon content but notes that they likely drew on the language and messages of papal bulls. Early sermons often demonized women, portraying them as impediments to crusading, and were used to shame men reluctant to leave home. By the thirteenth century, however, preachers increasingly recognized women as active supporters and patrons. Reynolds helps illustrate this shift through a brief analysis of Gerald of Wales’s Itinerarium Kambriae and the registers of the Archbishop of York, Walter Giffard. The former of these two sources offers an Anglo-centric perspective of a preaching tour, which broadly portrays women as a hindrance to crusading. In contrast, by the thirteenth century, preachers were actively encouraging women to engage with crusading through patronage. For example, in the registers of Walter Giffard, just over 1percent of unredeemed vows were made by women. By this time, Reynolds argues, the practice of vow redemption had become routine, and the limited presence of women in these records likely suggests that most women who took vows redeemed them immediately, thus explaining their general absence from the register.
The second part, comprising three chapters, explores how women underwrote and sustained crusading efforts. Reynolds emphasizes that crusading was not an isolated male pursuit, but a family and community enterprise that relied heavily on women’s encouragement, financial management, and patronage. Chapter 4 considers women’s influence in urging relatives to take the cross and in preserving stories of family crusading traditions. Financing such ventures was costly, and crusaders frequently sold or mortgaged lands to raise funds. This process often implicated women directly, particularly in cases involving dower property. Although such land was legally protected under English Common Law, Reynolds shows that women frequently consented to, or even initiated sales, demonstrating agency and commitment to the crusading cause. Legal disputes that followed these transactions reveal the complex intersection of devotion, property, and gender.
Building on the previous section, Chapter 5 explores the ways in which women contributed to crusading, selling land, money, and broader financial support through their patronage of crusading institutions such as the Military Orders. These passive donations likely provided a more tangible connection to the crusading cause than ordinary almsgiving. One of the most engaging discussions in this chapter concerns the management of crusaders’ estates. Women often acted as custodians of property during their husbands’ absence, providing administrative continuity and safeguarding assets. In doing so, they became integral to the material sustainability of crusading. Yet this role also exposed them to legal and financial risks, as returning crusaders, or their heirs, sometimes contested decisions made in their absence. Reynolds observed how many women who were custodians of property became embroiled in legal disputes following the return of crusaders. Reynolds’s analysis of these records underscores the precarious balance between female authority and patriarchal constraint in medieval England.
Chapter 6 situates women’s engagement within a broader familial tradition. Crusading became part of dynastic identity: families with a history of participation viewed further involvement as both spiritually meritorious and socially prestigious. For women, supporting a relative’s crusade thus reinforced lineage, honor, and remembrance, intertwining religious devotion with family legacy.
The final section, “Memory,” analyzes the aftermath of crusading, in which Reynolds also examines the memorialization of crusading through burial practices. Women’s chosen resting places could reflect their family’s crusading associations and their desire to be remembered within that tradition. Margaret of Lincoln, for example, was interred beside her father in Clerkenwell—an act that Reynolds interprets as a public reaffirmation of her natal family’s crusading identity over that of her two husbands. Such examples demonstrate how women used commemoration to shape both personal and familial memory of the crusading enterprise.
Overall, Reynolds’s study is a valuable and meticulously researched contribution to the expanding scholarship on gender and crusading. His focus on England addresses a significant gap in the field, which has often emphasized broader, pan-European perspectives rather than regional ones. Certain areas—particularly the financial and legal challenges faced by women who supported crusading—could have been developed further. The legal cases involving women were likely more extensive than current evidence reveals, and future discoveries may well shed further light on this dimension; this, however, is a minor critique. Reynolds lays a strong foundation for future research and compellingly demonstrates how the legal and social consequences of crusading extended well beyond the fulfilment of individual vows. Ultimately, this book deepens our understanding of the social dynamics of crusading and highlights the movement’s character as a collective enterprise, rooted as much in households and parishes as in the distant theatres of war.
