Depicting the Holy War

A revealing examination of how mural paintings show the sacralization of violence in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Depicting the Holy War examines the impact that crusades in the Middle East had on societies in western Europe through the analysis of a heretofore largely ignored type of source: mural paintings.

In this book, Elizabeth Lapina analyzes five programs of mural paintings from the early twelfth to the late thirteenth century in what is today France and England—in Hardham, Berzé-la-Ville, Poncé-sur-le-Loir, Cressac, and Tour Ferrande. These images provide rare sources of information about attitudes toward crusades in locations that have produced next to no written evidence about the subject, such as rural parishes. Four of the murals are found in ecclesiastical structures, themselves sacred and made more so as the location of the celebration of mass. This sacralization of violence, Lapina argues, led to changing attitudes toward the enemy and depictions of battles as “holy wars” between the forces of good and evil. The mural paintings come from England, Normandy, Aquitaine, Provence, and Burgundy, areas that supplied both numerous crusaders and ideas related to crusades. Taken together, the murals show a trend toward an acceptance and celebration of increasingly varied types of violence across the period.

This pathbreaking study employs new methods to open a window onto perceptions and representations of crusades in strata of society about which we know relatively little. It will be indispensable to historians and art historians who study crusades, warfare, and violence in medieval England and France.