vrouwen en kruistocht

Beste Milites Templi leden,
Beste bezoeker,

even een berichtje vanuit de academische wereld dat vooral de vrouwen zal verheugen. Conor Kostick heeft recent een boek geschreven rond de sociale samenstelling van de eerste kruisvaartcontingenten waarbij hij ook veel aandacht schenkt aan de vrouwelijke deelnemers. In een interview rond zijn nieuwe boek zegt hij het volgende:

"4. Your final chapter examines the women who took part in the First Crusade. Many historians have dismissed this group as just camp followers and prostitutes, but your findings portray them in a new light. Could you tell us more about these women who took part in the First Crusade?

For centuries historians have been well aware that a certain number of aristocratic women came on the First Crusade, but as these women played no prominent role, they are not generally portrayed as crusaders in their own right, more the appendage of the husband or guardian who brought them. To be fair, this reflects the reality of the experience of women of the nobility. Only under exceptional conditions, such as when she was a regent for an heir, did medieval aristocratic women become powerful political figures and of course those conditions were not present on the First Crusade (though they soon appeared once the Latin knights settled in the Near East). Much more unjustly neglected are the women of the lower social orders who came in their thousands. This is truer for the First Crusade, with its emmigratory character, than any other crusade. Entire families of farmers, men and women, loaded their goods and children into a cart and set off behind their oxen for a new land. Once you start to gather the source material on these women, it is abundant and fascinating. I won’t be able to do it justice here, but I will say that in the three examples of popular crusading contingents following women leaders towards Jerusalem and in the examples of the women who dressed as men to join the crusade, we are clearly looking at a very different phenomenon to that of the camp follower. These women clearly saw themselves as participants, as crusaders."


mvg,

xavier