In this fascinating history book about the Crusades in the medieval period, Helena Page Schrader focuses on the queens and noblewomen from the Outremer territories of west Asia (Jerusalem, Palestine, Syria, and Turkey). Bringing the vibrant cultural diversity and social scene of Outremer to life, Page Schraer brings the women of the region to life, emphasizing their power, strength, and political influence in the region. Focusing on Outremer and the Crusades, Page Schrader also explores the Crusades from the Outremer perspective and from the eyes of the women, like Eleanor of Aquitaine, who traveled on crusade with their husbands. Bringing some interesting primary documents and a history of Outremer into this book, Page Schrader creates the historical backdrop and context of the book needed to understand women’s roles and position in Outremer’s society. This dual challenge of Crusade historical narratives, readers will enjoy learning about some of the queens regnant, queens consort, princesses, and noblewomen from Outremer in Page Schrader’s latest book. A fantastic historical read which brings women’s history to life and challenges the mainstream narrative of the Crusades, this book on the women of Outremer is a must read for women’s history enthusiasts and fans of medieval history.

To be honest, the history and women of Outremer were and are not unfamiliar to me. It is my own area of researching, reading and documenting; so I think I came more into this to view another perspective.

The author emphasises that this is not for the expert but the hobby historian; it is a record of action and influence; it has no contemporary Moslem sources, nor does it provide any new evidence but instead collates it all in one place for the reader.

I found the first chapter provided no value to the reader - go straight to chapters 2 - 5 which talk about the formation of the Crusader State and the succession of its rulers. Chapter 6 provides a little more on Crusader society and provides three cases studies of notable women. Chapter 7 discusses legal rights, chapter 8 royal power, again focusing on notable Crusader monarch. Chapter 9 and 10 talk about the economy, patronage, and defence of the Holy Land, whilst Chapter 11 deals with the issues of defeat and enslavement.

All of this is followed by the biographies of the women discussed and featured in the tome - however, it is strictly a Eurocentric view.

Schrader, to give her her due, has put these women into context with the time and events, and has given them a little more "page time" than most standard Crusade texts - they are not invisible, you just needed to invest a little more time to seek them out.

If the reader is interested in this period, they will pick up this tome regardless - if you are solely interested in a collection of biographies on notable historical women, go straight to the end.

This book is honestly kind of appalling from a historical perspective. The author draws conclusions from information (or lack of information) which are totally unsupported, and then generalizes from those. For example, she writes that Roman "records... chillingly demonstrate that few Roman men chose to raise more than one daughter. The others, like their Athenian sisters, were slaughtered at birth." She's literally extrapolating from the lack of multiple daughters being mentioned in the (often scant) records of Roman personal lives to claim that Roman men routinely murdered their infant daughters. I just... there are so many logical jumps between "evidence" and "conclusion" that I am literally boggled.

Similarly, she makes bold assertions - for example, that it was "customary" for European queens to serve as regents for their minor sons during the middle ages - based on very little evidence (she cites three queens in two countries over the course of three hundred years, two of whom were regents for their adult sons on Crusade). Is she right? Who knows? I don't. She doesn't either.

There's also a very unpleasant level of anti-Islamic sentiment embedded in all of this; for example, she takes the rights of European medieval women at face value - the law said women had these rights, and at least one woman exercised them, so clearly all women had them - while telling us that polygamy is a "way for the man to humiliate the woman" and Islamic men also had a lot of concubines as well. You will also be absolutely appalled to hear that Muslims also made fun of Christianity and said mean things about Crusaders. I just... It was discomfiting, let's put it that way. I have no idea if it got worse because I could not see what I would get out of continuing to read.

An interesting look at the ladies that impacted and where impacted by a part of history that many have assumed didn't really have much womanly influence or characters.

Thank you to NetGalley, Helena Page Schrader, and the publisher, Pen & Sword History for granting my wish for this book in order for a fair review!

Overall, I think the prose was written beautifully. I did adore the appendix. It provided the context that I was so desperately craving as I read through the book. I think this is a fun read for anyone interested to just pick up. It's a good place to start for most readers. It takes existing scholarship and compiles it into an easily digestible form for those not familiar. While I have my very specific critiques, seen below, due to my own experience and ever-growing knowledge and works on the Crusades, I cannot recommend this enough.

Schrader's introduction of this book makes it very clear that this is a text for those who do not have a background in medieval studies/history, particularly Crusade History. While I appreciate this candidness, it does lead to several issues throughout the text.

I think if you are someone who is using this book as a starting point to learn about the history of the Crusade, there is a fair amount of facts to be learned here. However, there are several instances of vague citations / references to the sources used within this text. For example, this text neglects just how multicultural the Outremer was. You had inter-faith and culture marriages, yet, this narrative focuses primarily on Christian marriages.

Additionally, I wish the citations were a smidge better. As people continue to put out books for the average folks, I wish we would begin to use Chicago-Turabian (or even MHRA) citations. I understand this is primarily due to the publishing/publisher standards. However, providing footnotes with present citations as opposed to end notes, allows the reader to quickly access the citations without having to thumb through the pages. This can also help avoid the "he said, she said, scholars say" that is present in the book. I would love more specifics present within the text or at least nearby it. I know this is for the average folk, but why not make the sources as clear as possible from the jump?

An interesting survey of the people living in the Crusader States (Outremer) and the politics that went on around it. I enjoyed learning more about the rights of women in this time period and feudal society in general even more than the larger politics and attention to queens and princesses. The differences between how Christian and Muslim religion (and therefore politics) viewed women was well explained, and led well into why slavery was such a big thing that Christian women had to worry about. The author desensationalised this and used contemporary resources to bring home what life was like for women in slavery and the development of groups to free them, which I had never read about before and found fascinating.

I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review

The crusades were a sort of political game played between the popes and the different kings or emperors. The pople said go, the governants went to Gerusalem and it was often very different from a war.
It was a sort of exotic travel and it the noble people were take prisoner they speint time in luxury waiting to be freed.
This was the first book I read about these women and I found it informative and well done.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

This well-researched book is packed with interesting information. It’s easy to read, but the lack of a strong narrative meant it struggled to hold my interest.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC.

The Powerful Women of Outremer - Forgotten Heroines of the Crusader States by Helena Page Schrader is an absolutely compelling insight into the women of the crusades who are largely unreported throughout time. There is a long standing argument that women were uneducated chattel who were rarely taught to read and write and while this can be said for a good majority of women in this era, we are now learning more about the time and that the facts portray something very, very different

Helena Page Schrader has brought together an extensive litany of evidence to research and write this fascinating account which begins with a really useful chronology which is very helpful in cross-referencing and anchoring the narrative into established accounts and as such, builds on them whislt opening up a whole new world in the Middle Ages

I was hooked frim the first page due to the writing style. The author is able to communicate a lot of facts in an engaging and affable way (I never knew that Roman women were not considered to legally exist for example)

"All Roman women, therefore, lived only by the 'grace' of their father - and were expected to be eternally grateful for being allowed to exist at all"

The author goes on to discuss the impact of Christianity, Literacy in the upper classes, feudalism and chivalry and contrasting these with the Muslim world of the time and how this contrast set the foundation for the diversity of the "Outremer" states.

The book also includes deeply intriguing biographies, detailed maps and royal family trees that add an extra flourish to an already highly interesting and very well-researched book

If you have an interest in history and new breakthroughs in the field, this is certainly a book for you. Likewise, if you have interest in the Crusades or the sociocultural history of women. A fantastic, highly intelligent and very palatable read

Thank you to Netgalley, Pen & Sword, Pen & Sword History and the author Helena Page Schrader for this fascinating and enlightening ARC. My review is left voluntarily and all opinions are my own

This book has three parts. The first is an overall history of the Crusader states, <i>Outremer</i> of the title, with the leading women of the era as bookmarks for the history. The second part is more survey of the history and historical thinking about women in <i>Outremere</I>, discussing their rights and roles in a more general context. The last part is a series of biographical sketches of the most historically ascertainable (so primarily those same leading nobles) women that we have a good idea about. There is a stealth fourth part, consisting of artwork and maps and similar.

The second part of the book is the most interesting, and what I expected of the book, both in the sense of popular history books and in the sense of what the introduction promised to relay. The book teases the idea that the outsized role of women in <i>Outremere</I> is reflective of a similarly positioned role in the rest of western Europe, but also knows that it lacks the evidence or scope to assert that. My disappointment here is that the text sets up that it is going to describe the cosmopolitan diversity of the Crusader states for that to amount to the fact that Christians married other Christians when there, crossing ethnic and probably sectarian lines, in both the upper and lower classes. This to me seems less "various ethnic and religious groups living harmoniously" and more realpolitik and hormonal. But it has good sections on women in warfare, and women living through warfare, that provide excellent insight, other than some of the more standard sections on women's life in the era, and the unique opportunities that living in the Crusader states meant.

The first part of the book ought to be skipped. It is meant as an introduction to the Crusades and the Crusader states, which was particularly female. However, unlike the second section of the book, it has many problems.

It is poorly sourced. It includes a lot of 'people say' assertions, but mostly it has claims that I wish had citations to them. A few to me seem unique to the author, or I cannot find any other secondary source that makes them. I found one citation that is plain wrong, where the source cited does not make the claim that the author is. One section contradicts information in the second section of the book, or relates the histories so differently I would think that they came from different books. There is one outright rant that is confusing. She omits so many details that I would not understand either the facts or the complaints if this was my only source.

It is skippable because it is the culture war part of the book. I hate addressing these tar-babies where to provide any commentary is to invite discredit by someone operating out of atavistic reflex when keywords come out, which is why I am being punctilious about explaining what that position is. I will say that the 'I'm not here to educate you' is a bad look when the left does it and not something the right should adopt.

The perverse thing is that there is nothing that this part of the book does towards the author's unstated purpose than the second part of the book already does. Maybe not persuasively, because the author tends to straw man or use arguments that even her opposition would consider discredited, but more honestly. You got 1414 years of juicy fruit to pick from. Avow your actions and do so.

The third recapitulates the first two as more of an appendix. It recapitulates the information already presented but is up front about doing so. It is somewhere in the middle, in the sense that it includes the idiosyncratic material of the first section, so all my same sorts of critiques apply, though it also seems less pejorative, and more geared towards a captivating story, which uniformly is something that applies to all these women's stories. But then I hit one of those singular story bits and it throws me.

Technically, there is a fourth section, the actual appendix, which is useful, having a good timeline, maps, and some excellent reproductions of art of the era.

I wanted to love this book. I think that the prose itself is good. I am grateful for the texts that it has introduced me to in trying to run down where some of these stories came from. But heterodox claims require firm foundations, and instead of doing that work the book engages in unnecessary storytelling that squanders its credibility for what things it could do. I hope the author tries again with more rigor.

My thanks to the author, Helena Page Schrader, for writing the book and to the publisher, Pen & Sword, for making the ARC available to me.