Sacred Violence: The European Crusades to the Middle East, 1095-1396
Sacred Violenceproved to be exactly what I needed: clear, thorough without losing a reader in details, consistent in its point of view, and thematically coherent. My students appreciated that the author's point of view came through in certain ways, and we were able to use that as a starting point for talking about scholarly perspectives and issues of objectivity. I also was grateful for the author's attention to historiography, since I like to prompt students to think about how we construct the past, and the extent to which the topic of 'The Crusades' is in itself a historically constructed category that bears its own story through the early modern and modern era. Overall, the volume throughout has a vibrancy and liveliness that kept us all engaged.