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Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Helen J. Nicholson, "Women and the Crusades" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Description: The crusade movement needed women: their money, their prayer support, their active participation, and their inspiration.Helen J. Nicholson's book Women and the Crusades (Oxford UP, 2023) surveys women's involvement in medieval crusading between the second half of the eleventh century, when Pope Gregory VII first proposed a penitential military expedition to help the Christians of the East, and 1570, when the last crusader state, Cyprus, was captured by the Ottoman Turks. It considers women's actions not only on crusade battlefields but also in recruiting crusaders, supporting crusades through patronage, propaganda, and prayer, and as both defenders and aggressors. It...