Outfoxing Crusaders - parody, satire and non-participation in the crusades
Wednesday 27 February 2013
Venue: Lecture Theatre 8W 1.1
Reynard the Fox was famous throughout the European Middle Ages as a character who could embody and express through literature counter-culture, anti-establishment views which do not otherwise survive in the official historical record. These famous animal fables are used as a way of accessing potentially anti-crusading views amongst the medieval European population, to explore why so many people did not participate, why they disputed or ignored the calls from clerics and popes to go to war in distant lands and why they may have reacted scornfully to these repeated failures to recover 'holy land' territories after 1147.
For more lectures, see the full GULP programme.
Ms Sarah Lambert, Goldsmiths University
Ms Sarah Lambert of Goldsmiths University is an Essex girl by upbringing and her whole academic careers has been London based. She graduated from London University and had a long happy life as a post-graduate researcher at the Institute of Historical Research in Bloomsbury. She has worked at Goldsmiths, University of London, as a History Lecturer for 20 years. During that time she has researched and published in the areas of gender history, the politics of queenship and the crusades. She has also worked as an admissions tutor and outreach worker, advocating for higher education with a wide range of school and college students, as well as more mature audiences. At Goldsmiths, she organises the peer mentoring network for students across the college. Her current research is focussed on understanding popular reactions to crusade preaching through the vernacular literature of the Middle Ages.