Edgington, Susan B.

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Edgington, Susan B.

PERSONAL:

Education: Earned doctoral degree.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of History, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Rd., London E1 4NS, England.

CAREER:

Writer. Honorary research fellow at Queen Mary, University of London; former lecturer at Huntingdonshire Regional College.

WRITINGS:

(Translator, with Thomas S. Asbridge) Walter the Chancellor's "The Antiochene Wars," Ashgate Publishing (Brookfield, VT), 1999.

(Editor, with Sarah Lambert, and contributor) Gendering the Crusades, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 2002.

The First Crusade: The Capture of Jerusalem in AD 1099, Rosen Central (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to professional journals.

SIDELIGHTS:

Susan B. Edgington is the coeditor of Gendering the Crusades, "an important first step in providing critical and rhetorical contexts for further analysis of the roles and participation of women in crusading movements and in the political life of the Crusader States," remarked Linda E. Mitchell in the Journal of Women's History. According to English Historical Review critic Marcus Bull, the thirteen essays "attest to the variety and complexity of women's experiences in the contexts of advocating, organizing, participating in and commenting upon crusades. If there has been any lingering misconception that the most that women did in the crusades was to function on the fringes of military enterprises, it is swept away by this collection." "While the scholars show in what capacities women participated in the events," Christopher Corley stated on the H-Net Reviews Web site, "they also reveal the ways in which the wars were imagined and retold, and gender lies at the heart of these issues. Medieval narratives were gendered in that they reflected the social lives and expectations of the wider society, but gender also actively framed the meaning of the wars and cultural conflicts for people who lived at the time as well as for the people in later generations who would read about the wars in historical narratives."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

English Historical Review, September, 2000, C.J. Tyerman, review of Walter the Chancellor's "The Antiochene Wars," p. 933; April, 2003, Marcus Bull, review of Gendering the Crusades, p. 474.

Historian, spring, 2004, Louis Haas, review of Gendering the Crusades, p. 185.

Journal of Women's History, spring, 2004, Linda E. Mitchell, "Women Where They Ought Not to Be? Revising the View of the Medieval World," review of Gendering the Crusades, p. 183.