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Title: The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades by Jonathan Riley-Smith ISBN: 0-19-285428-3 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: May, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.14 (7 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Fifteen helpful articles and many fine illustrations
Comment: This is a series of fifteen articles by various authorities on aspects of the various wars refer to collectively as the Crusades. The include the origins of the Crusades, Songs, Architecture, Islam, later Crusade Movements, Military Orders, and how they Crusades have impacted art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as how they live on into our time. The articles are of a very high quality. While they are written for the general reader, they don't pander. They are well written and the more attention you give the articles the more you will take away.
As the title indicates, this book is richly illustrated with black and white images, maps, and many color plates. There is also a chronology of the Crusades (they really aren't a single event), a very nice list for further study, and a good index.
In light of the events of our time, this is one of the books you can turn to in order to get some background of how Europe and the Middle East have interacted for the past millennium in order to get some background on the cultural baggage weighing on what is happening today. Today never flows directly out of the past; it is a confluence of various streams from the past with different currents, flow, and debris. Unless you are already a specialist, you will learn many helpful things from these essays.
Rating: 4
Summary: Review of Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades
Comment: By:Jonathan Riley-Smith
Reviewed by:D. Wang
P.5
The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades is a book about you want and don't want to know about the crusades. The book's opening chapters aren't about the actual military action at all. It's about the minds of the crusaders, the songs of the time, the Latin East. It's not until chapter nine that military orders, movements, and actions are mentioned. The book concludes with a comparison of modern day events and the crusades.
I liked this book because of the sheer amount of information. on page 86 it says "Men and women, including elderly crusaders, came to Jerusalem to end their days. The charnel chambers in the Hospitallers' ruined twelfth-century cemetry-church at Alcheldamach, just outside Jersalem, are still filled with the bones of pious Christians." It is extremely doubtful you will find this variety of information in a textbook.
This book really took the effort to find all the information possible. An entire chapter of the book is devoted to songs about the crusade. There are not many books about a series of wars where an entire chapter is devouted to songs. The book puts a lot a information and visual material in 436 pages. It is very easy to be overwhelmed, and the authors should have made it easier to comprehend.
My favorite part of the book is the last chapter. "In a surprising development, however, the theology of force that underpinned crusading has been revived, especially in Latin America, by a militant wing of Christian Liberation." It is amzing how we humans fall from the same things over and over again, and this chapter previews of what might come. I like to compare our present to our past because it makes you realize how many times we've made the same mistake over and over again. Sometimes we just fail to take the past into consideration.
Rating: 4
Summary: Very useful and pleasant book
Comment: « The Oxford History of' » could suggest some grey bearded professors laboriously writing history nobody but them would understand, but far from it, Jonathan Riley-Smith has managed to edit the erudite contributions to this book into a pleasant and interesting format. Some pages, very few actually, are a little heavy going but most chapters are fascinating. They assume a reasonably smart reader ' nobody buys a history of the Crusades if he or she is exclusively into hard rock or soccer ' but for the average person with an interest in history and a probably bad recollection of the Crusades as they were taught to teenagers some decades ago, this a perfect book. It requires no more than a general idea of the who's who at the time and even that is made very clear chapter after chapter. I particularly enjoyed the sections describing the Crusades from the point of view of the people who were at the receiving end. Yet the book is balanced and does not fall into the stereotype of picturing the crusaders as greedy bad guys, turned loose on the local populace by manipulative popes and clerics promising them that past and future sins would be forgiven, although there was quite a bit of that. The chapters on the military orders are great and the final chapter describes the later perception of the Crusades throughout history with plenty of surprises: who knows that Voltaire was scathingly contemptuous of the crusaders? Think of it, though, it fits the great man's view of the world neatly. The illustrations are very good and abundant. Anyone with an interest in the Crusades should read this book.
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Title: Crusades Through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf ISBN: 0805208984 Publisher: Schocken Books Pub. Date: 29 April, 1989 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: A History of the Crusades: Volume 1, The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem by Steven Runciman ISBN: 052134770X Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 03 December, 1987 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: The Crusades: A Short History by Jonathan Riley-Smith ISBN: 0300047002 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: April, 1990 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: A Concise History of the Crusades by Thomas F. Madden ISBN: 0847694291 Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing (via NBN) Pub. Date: 01 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Arab Historians of the Crusades by Francesco Gabrieli ISBN: 0520052242 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: July, 1984 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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