Content area
Full text
The First Crusade: Origins and Impact. Edited by Jonathan Phillips. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. xvi + 202 pp. $59.95 cloth; $19.95 paper.
The First Crusade: Origins and Impact is a collection of articles by nine English medievalists originally presented at a conference with almost the same title at the Institute of Historical Research in London in November 1995. Two other participants have also contributed to the volume: Jonathan Riley-Smith, an introduction (1-4) and the editor, Jonathan Phillips, a postscript (181-86). Although all deal with the 1096 campaign, the papers fall into several categories, with the principal one being a re-examination of the main written sources in a search for biases, deficiencies, points previously overlooked, and the like. Almost all of the chroniclers treated in this way have long been well known and studied by earlier scholars but this does not preclude new insights by later generations. One of the investigations is iconoclastic: finding it largely unreliable Alan Murray dismisses the curious chronicle of Zimmern, a sixteenth-century family history from southwestern Germany that reports people and incidents not encountered in any other narrative source and generally considered to be accurate ("The Chronicle of Zimmern as a Source for the First Crusade," 78-106). On the other hand Susan...