Godfrey of Bouillon: Representations of Kingship and Masculinity on the First Crusade

This thesis uses a gendered reading of twelfth-century narratives of the First Crusade (1096-99) to analyse their presentation of Godfrey of Bouillon (d.1100), one of the crusade leaders and first Latin ruler of Jerusalem. Godfrey’s short reign has meant many modern historians consider his life a myth and that most of our knowledge of him was created after his death. This has caused these historian to place little value on researching him. However, using masculinity as an analysis of his deeds allows us to gain ideas about kingly masculinity in the twelfth-century, and how these ideas were disseminated through narratives.
This thesis encompasses many of the twelfth-century crusade narratives which are disregarded by crusade historians because they were not eye witness to the events they describe. However this large corpus of texts can be better utilised to give us more ideas and knowledge about twelfth-century Western European thinking on the ideas of crusading, kingship, war, politics and religion. This means all texts regarding the First Crusade in the twelfth century have value for the insight they offer in this regard.
Masculinity is not something gained through passing a certain age, it had to be learned, and therefore this work focuses on kingly masculinity which is the apex of masculinity and would have been used to inspire many of the warrior classes to go on crusade or how to act in general. These texts helped form the construction of their masculinity by their didactic nature, and they would have learned to be an ‘ideal man’ through the precedents set by their forbearers. As such these texts are deconstructed in this thesis to show exactly what constituted kingly masculinity in the twelfth-century.