“Intimate Scripts” in the Chanson de Jérusalem: Another Approach to Crusader Motivation

Since the pioneering scholarship of Jonathan Riley-Smith and Marcus Bull in the last decade of the twentieth century, studies of crusader motivation have primarily focused on the early crusading movement, above all the First Crusade (1095–99), and have privileged a specific source type: charter evidence. Comparatively little attention has been afforded to the topic of crusader motivation in the thirteenth century, with a lack of scholarly consensus regarding the source material and methodologies that historians should utilize and prioritize. This article proposes that greater engagement with the history of emotions—specifically, the methodological approach of “intimate scripts,” which emphasizes the ability of literature to teach patterns of feeling and elicit emotional responses—offers a path forward. It does so by applying this framework, devised by Sarah McNamer in 2010 but largely neglected by historians, to the Chanson de Jérusalem: the third instalment in the triptych of Old French chansons de geste set during the First Crusade, known collectively as the central trilogy of the Old French Crusade Cycle. By scripting emotion, it is argued, the Jérusalem would have not only taught prospective crusaders how to feel and how to perform their feelings on crusade, but potentially also garnered actual emotional responses from listeners—emotional responses that may well have triggered crusade participation.