The Crusades and Nature: Natural and Supernatural Environments in the Middle Ages

The Crusades and Nature: Natural and Supernatural Environments in the Middle Ages explores the intersection of crusader studies and studies of nature. The volume addresses encounters with, responses to and representations of a broad variety of phenomena: celestial objects and events; familiar and unfamiliar fauna and flora; seascapes and landscapes; the elements and the seasons; etc. It introduces readers to crusaders’ actual, but also largely or entirely imaginary encounters with natural phenomena, as well as literary references to nature in crusader sources more generally (such as, for example, animal metaphors). Finally, this project investigates the relationships between the natural and the supernatural and between nature and human-made environments. The volume will define ＂crusades＂ broadly, to include not only crusades to the East, but also crusades to frontier regions such as the Baltic and Iberian peninsula and extends to representations of crusades and nature in later medieval and early modern sources.

Jessalynn L. Bird is Associate Professor of Humanistic Studies at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, USA, and a Regional Fellow of the Medieval Institute. She has published widely on the crusades, medieval heresy, and the activities of individuals trained in Paris as preachers, reformers, and judges delegate. She is co-editor, with Edward Peters and the late James Powell, of Crusade and Christendom: Annotated Documents in Translation, Innocent III to the Fall of Acre, 1187-1291; with G.E.M. Lippiatt, Crusading Europe: Essays in Honour of Christopher J. Tyerman (2019); with Damian Smith, The Fourth Lateran Council and the Crusade Movement: The Impact of Fourth Lateran (1215) on Latin Christendom and the East (2018); and sole editor of The Papacy, Crusade, and Christian-Muslim Relations: Essays in Memory of James M. Powell (2018).

Elizabeth Lapina is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. She is a co-editor of three volumes: Games and Visual Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, co-edited with Vanina Kopp (2020); The Uses of the Bible in Crusader Sources, co-edited with Nicholas Morton (2017); The Crusades and Visual Culture, co-edited with April Morris, Susanna Throop and Laura Whatley (2015). She is the author of one monograph (Warfare and the Miraculous in the Chronicles of the First Crusade (2015) and a number of articles.