The Experience of Crusading (review)
2005; The Catholic University of America Press; Volume: 91; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/cat.2005.0149
ISSN1534-0708
Autores Tópico(s)Medieval History and Crusades
ResumoReviewed by: The Experience of Crusading Gary Dickson The Experience of Crusading. Volume One: Western Approaches. Edited by Marcus Bull and Norman Housley ; Volume Two: Defining the Crusader Kingdom. Edited by Peter Edbury and Jonathan Phillips . ( New York: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. xvi, 311; xv, 311. $60.00; $65.00.) The illustrissimo of Anglophone crusade historians, Jonathan Riley-Smith, is the worthy dedicatee of this handsomely produced, two-volume, sixty-fifth-birthday present from his former students and crusade colleagues. And in it Jonathan—I confess a friendship—appears twice. For the same portrait of the amiable, pipe-smoking scholar serves as the frontispiece of each volume. Would that the editors had inserted along with their respective "Appreciations" a bibliography of his books, essays, and reviews. Particularly in Volume Two, they are guilty of referring to his works without properly citing them. One aspect of Jonathan's achievement deserves to be underscored. A driving force behind the foundation of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East in 1980, he provided crusade studies with a vital institutional focus. Nowadays, no medievalist, regardless of specialism, can ignore the pervasiveness of crusading culture in the Middle Ages. Witness the chronological range of these essays (c. 1000–c. 1400), together with their geographical sweep (Western Europe, the Levant, the Mediterranean world). Likewise impressive are the genres of history represented. Western Approaches, the European volume, begins with Marcus Bull, who offers wise observations on so many themes, e.g., Urban II's sermon, miracula as sources, that his title vainly struggles to contain them. Giles Constable notes that the conquest of Lisbon (1147) was indisputably integral to the Second Crusade. Norman Housley highlights the fundamental problem of the staggering costs of crusading, which, ironically, fourteenth-century promoters of the crusade [End Page 362] helped to publicize. Perhaps because the rhetorical pieties of the sources are taken at face value, Christopher Marshall perceives no contradiction between the religious and commercial motives of the Italian city-republics for supporting the crusades. Signaling the influences of the First Crusade upon the Second, Jonathan Phillips argues that Odo of Deuil's De profectione Ludovici VII is "more complex" than is usually assumed. James Powell examines the failure of Innocent III's "two-track policy" to win over the Byzantine Emperor Alexius III on the eve of the Fourth Crusade. John Pryor's essay on the Fourth-Crusade Venetian fleet comes as a breath of fresh sea air. Pryor presents a strong case for an amphibious attack on Egypt as Dandolo's "original objective." Anna Sapir Abulafia's touches on Joachim of Fiore's attitude to the crusades (disregarding B. Z. Kedar's critique of E. R. Daniel), but is mostly concerned with Joachim and the conversion of the Jews. James Brundage demonstrates convincingly how the canonists created a new category of "ecclesiastical persons" to accommodate the military orders. Currently preparing a critical edition of Humbert of Romans's De predicacione crucis (after 1266), Penny J. Cole proves that Humbert took the First Crusade as his paradigm. Characteristically probing, H. E. J. Cowdrey distinguishes between the bellum sacrum and the bellum iustum, and dates the blurring of that distinction to the end of the twelfth century. In an essay which is not altogether in harmony with Cowdrey's, John France takes up the Christian attitude to war before 1000, cleverly exploiting hagiography to refute Erdmann. Art and the crusades is reserved for Christoph T. Maier, who (unsurprisingly) utilizes crusade sermons to illuminate what may be the earliest surviving MS. codex of a bible moralisée. Anthony Luttrell discusses the Hospitaller house in twelfth-century Constantinople, as part of his ever-burgeoning oeuvre on that Order. Helen Nicholson persuasively shows how, instead of serving the crusades, the Irish Templars and Hospitallers were turned into servants of the crown by English kings. Helpfully reminding us that fictionalizing the crusades began during the First Crusade, Susan Edginton surveys the First Crusade in post–World War II fiction, wondering if historical novels capture the mentalité of crusaders. Nearly all her titles come off poorly. Following on, Elizabeth Siberry extends the popular image of the First Crusade more broadly...
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