Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the rolls, or rouleaux in French, which chronicle Eudes of Nevers’s little-known crusade expedition that opens a window onto the practicalities and ideologies of crusading in the mid-thirteenth century. Although comparable to other crusader testaments, the Account-Inventory, as it has come to be known, is far richer and much less self-consciously stylized. This makes the text a marvelous case study for thinking about the material Outremer and crusader materiality. As a long-form text that traveled out of Outremer, the Account-Inventory also shared a trajectory and set of linguistic practices and terms with other contemporary literary texts both prose and poetry. The chapter explains that the book compares it with Rutebeuf’s crusade poems. The chapter also considers the form and function of the parchment rolls, before discussing the chronology of the rouleaux.