Richard the Lionheart, Contested Queerness, and Crusading Memory

Abstract

This article explores King Richard I of England (r. 1189–99) and the medieval and modern historiography on the subjects of 1) his contested sexuality and 2) his participation in the Third Crusade (1187–92). In addition to demonstrating that the evidence of his queerness is both considerable and unambiguous, the article investigates how Richard’s political and cultural legacy has been used and re-used, how his status as an English national hero has been increasingly called into question, and how modern anxieties about the medieval crusades have driven the need to reconfigure his historical memory. It also briefly touches upon questions of ‘religious’ versus ‘secular’ violence, transhistorical Christian-Muslim relations, and the problematic and enduring mythology of the crusades in modern and post-Brexit Britain, especially in regard to the epistemological legacy of the Western Christian world, its historical empire-building and other projects in which the crusades have played a major role, and the ongoing reckoning and reshaping of these ideas. Lastly, it proposes new concepts of premodern queer memory and the academic practice of queer history, and calls for the creation of an analytical space that assertively centres these complexities.