J.L. Nelson

J.L. Nelson was a professor of medieval history at King’s College London. King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne was published in 2019. She died in October 2024.

Letter

Charlemagne’s Piety

19 August 2004

The notion that the Reformation made art ‘no longer sacred’ keeps company in Joseph Koerner’s The Reformation of the Image with a view of medieval religion as a magical business in which a passive laity was only marginally involved. Eamon Duffy does well to end his review of Koerner by discussing two images of the ‘devout inwardness’ of late medieval Catholic devotion (LRB, 19 August). Neither...

Eastern Promises: The Christian Holy War

J.L. Nelson, 29 November 2007

On 15 July 1099, a Christian army perhaps 14,000 strong captured Jerusalem after a five-week siege and three years’ campaigning. A contemporary witness reported slaughter on such a scale that ‘crusaders rode in blood to the knees and bridles of their horses.’ Christopher Tyerman quotes this twice, in full and slightly abbreviated forms, noting that the chronicler was...

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