Museum exhibitions on the material and visual culture of the Crusades may offer accessible means to engage with the complexities of medieval Europe’s interactions around the Mediterranean. By presenting objects and narratives from the Crusading era, exhibitions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Jerusalem 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven (2016–17) bridge scholarly research and public understanding, making a distant and contested geography materially and imaginatively tangible. They reveal the religious, political, and artistic forces that shaped the Crusades while inviting reflection on how European perceptions of the Holy Land were constructed and preserved. Through such curation, these exhibitions demonstrate the importance of public history in fostering historical awareness and nuanced engagement with the medieval past.

In this tradition, Amanda Luyster’s exhibition Bringing the Holy Land Home: The Crusades, Chertsey Abbey, and the Reconstruction of a Medieval Masterpiece, held from January to April 2023 at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross, offered a uniquely focused case study of thematic exhibition design and interdisciplinary scholarship.  Bridging academic research and public history, the exhibition, still available through its website, investigates how a thirteenth-century English audience might have encountered and interpreted Crusade narratives through a remarkable series of ceramic tiles discovered at Chertsey Abbey. 

The accompanying volume, edited by Luyster and published by Brepols, focuses on the “combat” tiles and places them within the broader framework of medieval English art and cross-cultural exchange.  Originally part of an elaborate floor program likely commissioned by or for King Henry III (1207–1272) and Eleanor of Provence (1223–1291) for Westminster Palace in the 1250s and later discovered in the ruins of Chertsey Abbey, the tiles feature figural and narrative imagery drawn from Arthurian legend, the zodiac and labors of the month, and various scenes of combat including lion hunts, biblical battles, and an imagined duel between Saladin and Richard the Lionheart.

While these tiles have been studied traditionally as examples of local monastic craft or as evidence of English Gothic ceramic production, Luyster and the contributors to the volume reframe them as products of international influence. In doing so, they emphasize how aesthetics, materials, and ideologies from the eastern Mediterranean shaped artistic production in England, demonstrating how the Crusades not only influenced geopolitics but also left a lasting imprint on European visual culture.

The volume of essays includes a foreword by Michael Wood, which lays out the state of the scholarship on the Chertsey tiles and identifies a “brilliant piece of detective work” (12) in Luyster’s reconstruction of the visual program and Latin inscriptions of the now widely dispersed and damaged ceramic tiles.  Meredith Fluke, director of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross, provides a foreword that highlights the significant academic work and practical collaboration required to present the exhibit.

Luyster’s foundational essay, “The Chertsey Tiles: Reassembling Fragments of Meaning,” argues that the tiles must be situated within the cultural and ideological framework of the Crusades.  She links the combat iconography to the memory and mythology of the Crusader experience, suggesting that the repeated combat scenes, especially those referencing Richard the Lionheart (1157­–1199), evoke a military ethos steeped in both historical campaigns and imagined Mediterranean encounters. These scenes, Luyster contends, reflect not only English self-perception in the thirteenth century, but also the appropriation and reinterpretation of Byzantine and Islamic visual motifs.

The volume’s subsequent essays expand upon this transregional perspective, providing context for the creation of the tiles and their likely reception at the English court.  The next two essays provide a solid, if necessarily brief, historical foundation for understanding the Crusades from different perspectives. Suleiman A. Mourad’s “A Clash of Civilizations? Diverse Motivations, Multiple Actors, and the Hidden Richness of Muslim Historical Sources” counters the reductive East-versus-West paradigm, emphasizing instead the complex interfaith interactions that defined the period. David Nicolle follows with a historical and geographical overview with “The Crusades: A Short History.” While Euan Roger’s, “So Much National Magnificence and National History: The Foundation, Structure, and Fall of Chertsey Abbey,” provides the framework for the story of Chertsey Abbey, where the tiles would be found centuries after its dissolution under King Henry VIII (1491–1547).

The remaining essays in the volume adopt an art historical lens to investigate the iconographic, material, and cultural contexts surrounding the Chertsey tiles, situating them within broader networks of medieval artistic production and exchange. Richard Leson’s essay, “Epic Sensibilities in French Art of the Crusader Period,” examines how epic literary traditions shaped visual representations of chivalric combat, both historically real and imagined. Cynthia Hahn explores the translation of material and sacred objects from the East and their symbolic function in English devotional life in “Re-creating the Holy Land at Home: Relics from the East in England.” Elizabeth Dospěl Williams, “The Mobility of Fabric: Textiles in and around Medieval Eurasia,” and Eva R. Hoffman, “Crusaders in Jerusalem: Frankish Encounters with Idols, Holy Monuments, and Portable Objects,” turn to textile production and portable metalwork objects, respectively, to trace material and aesthetic flows from the Mediterranean to Western Europe. Sarah M. Guérin, “Oliphants and Elephants: African Ivory in England,” investigates the circulation of African ivory at the London court, linking such imports to the creation of luxury devotional objects. Scott Redford’s essay, “A Cupbearer Crosses Cultures: Figural Ceramic Traditions of the Eastern Mediterranean,” examines the visual language of a tile depicting a cupbearer, situating it within the broader context of Mediterranean ceramic traditions.  Notably, this is the only contribution in the volume to focus on a tile from the “zodiac” series, offering a distinct perspective apart from the primary emphasis on the combat tiles.  Finally, Paroma Chatterjee, “Citizens and Invaders: Encounters with Sculpture in Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade,” analyzes the looting of Constantinople during this period, highlighting the role of Byzantine spolia in shaping Western perceptions of imperial grandeur.

The final section, “Objects in Focus,” includes thirteen concise essays authored by Andrea Myers Achi, Sean Gilsdorf, Nina Masin-Moyer, Alicia Walker, A.L. McClanan, Meredith Fluke, Grace P. Morrissey, Eurydice S. Georganteli, and undergraduate students from Boston College (Nadiia Fuchedzhy, Eliza Howlett, Natalia Ramirez, Bjorn Shurdha, Emma Villegas, Alexander Vollbrecht, Isabella Wellinghorst, and Peyton Wilson).  Each essay centers a selected object intended to offer a distinct perspective on the material and cultural dimensions of the Crusades.  Several entries also include recommended readings, further contextualizing the artifacts under discussion.

The selection of objects in this section underscores that the volume is not intended to serve as a conventional exhibition catalog. That function is instead fulfilled by the accompanying digital resource—chertseytiles.holycross.edu—which remains accessible as of 2025 and provides a structured, narrative-driven presentation of the works. This publication, by contrast, assembles a rigorously curated set of scholarly reflections that support a timely and compelling interpretive framework within medieval studies. Central to this argument is the assertion that artistic and material production in thirteenth-century England, even in seemingly peripheral contexts, was deeply embedded in broader systems of cultural contact and exchange. The volume effectively highlights the dynamism of transregional networks that flourished during the era of the Crusades, challenging notions of insularity—even when dealing with England—in medieval artistic practice.