Over the last three decades, historical conceptions of the involvement of women in the crusading movement have profoundly shifted. Jumpstarted by the germinal Gendering the Crusades (2001), edited by Susan Edgington & Sarah Lambert, alongside classic works by Natasha Hodgson, Christoph Maier, Sabine Geldsetzer, and Helen Nicholson, understanding of precisely how entangled women were in crusading systems of values, devotional and martial practices, and the logistical preparations and financial sustenance of expeditions, is now widespread among medieval historians.

Even more recently, such reconsiderations have started to be taken into account in medieval literary studies. This volume applies such an ethos of reinterrogation of the role of women onto a body of texts which have had their own venerable (sub-)discipline grow up around them: the 'crusade lyric'. The reviewed volume constitutes a mass of chapters mostly interrogating this heterogenous body of several dozen songs in Old French, Old Occitan, and Middle High German, granted in recent years significantly more prominence in anglophone scholarship by Linda Paterson's Singing the Crusades (2018) and the associated collaborative 'Crusade Lyrics' project. While the title here suggests equal focus on this type of text and 'narrative literature', the emphasis is heavily on the former and so the book is undoubtedly of most interest to French-speaking scholars working on the twelfth and thirteenth century lyric. It thus responds to some of the frameworks of analysis left by previous scholars in this field. Particularly prominent at the conjuncture between the figure of the woman in lyric poetry and the matter of crusade are Madeleine Tyssens, Pierre Bec, Jean-Charles Payen, Cathrynke Dijsktra, and Saverio Guida. Readers who have engaged with the work of the above will feast enthusiastically on the rich and copious contents of this volume.

Across the eighteen chapters, plus substantial introduction by the editors, there is greater crossover of source material and topic than is usual in edited collections of essays. That so many chapters deal with a few songs centrally - notably Chanterai de mon corage, attributed variously to the (perhaps fictitious) 'Dame de Fayel', and Guiot de Dijon; the Châtelain d'Arras' Aler m'estuet la ou je trairai paine; and Ahi! Amors, com dure departie of Conon of Béthune - adds to the coherency of the volume, but somewhat at the expense of appeal to a wider readership. For example, Chanterai is a significant subject of analysis in chapters by Rosenstein, Gatti, Raguin, Ibos-Augé, May Golden, and Richards. Conon of Béthune's Ahi! Amors is used substantially by Buschinger, Ibos-Augé, Rieger, and Maudoux; while Aler m'estuet features heavily in the contributions of Raguin, Russo, Maudoux, Simó, and Muzzolon. Yet despite the largely shared corpus, there is plenty of room for disagreement between chapters.

Two of the central areas where opinions diverge relate to long-standing subdisciplinary obsessions: the definitional genre characteristics of 'crusade lyric' (chapters by Gatti, López-Muñoz, Raguin, Rosenstein), and the extent to which the portrayal of women in these songs can be used to hear the voices of women or unearth the realities of women's subjectivities and experience. Very largely, the main focus of this volume is a subcategory of the chansons de croisade: those which mention or portray women, or in the case of the contributions of Raguin and Ibos-Augé, those which convey women's 'voices'.

As all the songs under discussion have assumed or known male composers, with possibly three contested exceptions (and indeed contested between contributors!), the extent to which analysis of these songs unveils anything beyond men's fantasy, often misogynistic or fetishizing, is hotly disputed within these pages. There is no shared understanding of how to read the idealised 'lover' of the chanson de departie, the song usually in the voice of the departed crusader bemoaning his newfound separation from his beloved, but sometimes (as with Chanterai) in the voice of a lamenting woman left behind. For some contributors, with a more positive reading of the possibility of female authorship of certain texts, analysis of these lyrics permits a recovery of women's subjectivities and experiences of the realities of crusade (e.g. May Golden); for others, who see the construction of a passive object in which crusade ideology is concretised, the idealised lover is little more than a static cipher for a damning view of women's interests as antithetical to pious crusading inspiration (Richards, Rieger). Such variant views are stimulating and thought-provoking to compare.

Other themes are returned to frequently: the permeable lines of influence, and yet distinct expectations of the langue d'oc and langue d'oïl traditions (Gatti, Rieger, Raguin); the spatiotemporal dynamics of the female-focused crusade lyric, especially the separation of male lover and female loved (Russo, Muzzolon, Stäblein Gillies, López-Muñoz); and the instrumental or quasi-propagandistic use of this type of text to influence contemporary medieval politics (Annunziata, Guérin). The final impression of all of these short chapters is to depict a field of study in the midst of dynamic reconsideration of its very foundations: what the corpus constitutes, what it means, and what relationship the female-focused lyric bears with the historical realities of women's lives.

There are contributions which push the coverage in interesting directions. Buschinger's piece provides a welcome shift to the German Minnesang tradition, focusing on the conflict between duty to God and love for a woman in this specific linguistic-cultural environment. López-Muñoz's all-too-short contribution tackles the difficulty of defining 'crusade lyric' in conventional generic terms of style and makes an argument for understanding it as defined primarily by its employment of toponyms and spatial associations, taking as a relatively neglected example the song Pour joie avoir perfite en Paradis.

Albert's 'Hélène à la croisée des genres' stands out in the volume for its fascinating, detailed argument relating to the prologue for the Venjance Nostre Seigneur in Turin MS L.II.14, which depicts one of many Helens/Helenas. Albert argues that this Hélène, the daughter of emperor Vespasian and visionary wife of King David of Greece, who heads to the Holy Land with her new husband to recover the True Cross, is blurred not only with Helen of Troy, but also the Arthurian St Helen and Helen mother of Constantine. This text's 'Helen' exists at the conceptual crossroads between different temporalities, gendered norms, and spiritual functions: she fights in single combat, her normally milk-providing breasts soaked in blood and lambasting her husband for his reluctance to fight for faith. Albert reveals a collapse and conjuncture of various ideas associated with crusade, heritage, and sacred time, positioning this within the antisemitic context of the expulsion of Jews from France, c. 1306.

The volume is not without challenges to the non-specialist reader. Few of the chapters make any real concessions to a reader not au fait with the debates, generic categorizations, and conceptual implications of arguments relating to the trouvére/troubadour lyric. Furthermore, the inconsistent approach to providing translations of medieval languages has resulted in some baffling decisions. The Middle High German of Buschinger's article is sometimes translated, sometimes not, into modern French. On pp. 266-7, one quite long lyric (MF 216) is presented in the body text, but not translated at all in the relevant footnote (11), while footnote 10 presents a lengthy translation of a different lyric (MF 218) which is not cited or really discussed at all beyond an allusion in the body text. Occitan is translated in some contributions - i.e. Rieger's - but not in others, such as Annunziata's. Despite this, the accuracy of the presentation and editing is very high, and the volume is helpfully furnished with appendices, abstracts, and indexes of works, authors, and manuscripts. All this reinforces the impression that this volume is targeted exclusively to the specialist researcher of the crusade lyric - but for those readers, the volume will be indispensable, and no doubt make a significant impact on considerations of agency, definition, genre, spatiotemporal abstraction, and the love/duty binary so often elevated by this corpus as a moral quandary.

In sum, this collection speaks persuasively to the interrelated and interwoven worlds of women and sanctified warfare in the Middle Ages. It (rightly) makes consideration of women's representation and participation in such phenomena central to understanding medieval mentalities.

Simon Parsons