The debate on the Crusades / Christopher Tyerman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tyerman, Christopher, author.

Series:

Issues in historiography.

Issues in historiography

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Crusades--Historiography.

Crusades.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 260 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Place of Publication:

Manchester ; New York : Manchester University Press, 2011.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

This book investigates the ways in which the crusades have been observed by historians from the 1090s to the present day. Especial emphasis is placed on the academic after-life of the crusades from the sixteenth to twenty-first centuries. The use of the crusade and its history, by humanists and other contemporary writers, occupied a world of polemic, serving parochial religious, cultural and political functions. Since the Renaissance humanists and Reformation controversialists, one attraction of the crusades had lain in their scope: recruited from all western nations, motivated by apparently transcendent belief systems and fought across three continents. From the perspective of western Europe's engagement with the rest of the globe from the sixteenth century, the crusades provided the only post-classical example to hand of an ideological and military world war. Remarkably, the patterns of analysis of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century have scarcely gone away: empathy; disapproval; relevance; the role of religion; materialist reductionism. Despite the explosion of literary attention, behind the empathetic romanticism of Michaud or the criticism of Mills and Scott, the themes identified by Thomas Fuller, Claude Fleury, David Hume, Edward Gibbon and William Robertson persisted. The idea of the crusades as explicit precursors to modern events, either as features of teleological historical progress or as parallels to modern actions remains potent. The combination of ideology, action, change, European conquest and religious fanaticism acted as a contrast or a comparison with the tone of revolutionary and reactionary politics.

Contents:

Introduction

Medieval views on the Crusades

Reformation, revision, texts and nations 1500-1700

Reason, faith and progress: a contested Enlightenment

Empathy and materialism: keeping the crusade up to date

Scholarship, politics and the Golden Age of research

The end of colonial consensus

Erdmann and Runciman and the end of tradition

Definitions and directions

Epilogue.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 24 Apr 2026).

Includes bibliographical references (pages 249-251) and index.

ISBN:

9781847798992

1847798993

9781847799005

1847799000

OCLC:

936298238