Jonathan Sumption

Marching Off to War

Fighting for the Cross: Crusading to the Holy Land

By

Yale University Press 357pp £25 order from our bookshop

Medieval studies, which dominated university history faculties only half a century ago, have fallen from favour. The problems of the Middle Ages are thought to lack contemporary relevance. Their study requires skills that have become rare, such as a reasonable command of Latin and other languages. Medievalists have to step outside the conventions of their own world to confront societies whose outlook often seems arcane and rebarbative, a form of curiosity which is admired in anthropologists but less so in historians. ‘Medieval’ has become a term of abuse, generally applied to some peculiarly modern vice by people who know next to nothing about the Middle Ages.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Ideas that I’d thought were set down in full continue to smoulder ... this book is only a snapshot of some larger… ,
    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    • 'Bythell glowers past his till at a world in slow free fall.' on the travails of a second-hand book… ,
    • 'It is a scent of animal wrath, of instinctive need, of brutal life which affects the cultured nostrils of our civi… ,
    Follow Us