Leanda de Lisle
Mice, Locusts & Sodomy
Defending the City of God: A Medieval Queen, the First Crusades, and the Quest for Peace in Jerusalem
By Sharan Newman
Palgrave Macmillan 256pp £17.99 order from our bookshop
Sharan Newman began writing Defending the City of God as a biography of Melisende, the first hereditary queen of Jerusalem, but expanded it to include the lives of her parents, siblings, in-laws, more distant relatives, their enemies and the ‘many diverse peoples who lived in the Near East’. It’s a complex story and one that in Newman’s hands left me as baffled as a six-year-old in a sex education lesson. What on earth is going on?
It seems Melisende was born around 1105 in the city of Edessa (in what is modern Turkey). She was the daughter of a French crusader king, Baldwin of Le Bourq, who ruled the city, and an Armenian noblewoman whose father was killed by Muslims and eaten by dogs. Much happens
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Walk down your supermarket pet food aisle and you’ll be hard pressed to find a single brand that claims to be made with high-welfare meat. More expensive pet food should not be about spoiling our cats but about sparing the farmed beasts we feed them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/meattoo
'Two things prevent [this book] from collapsing under the weight of its own wayward ambition. Colin Jones, one of the finest living scholars of early modern France, is no ordinary historian. And the day in question, 27 July 1794, was no ordinary day'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/night-of-the-guillotine
The Anatomy of Melancholy 'has never quite become a widely recognised, bona fide "classic". For long stretches, the bulk of its readership has been restricted to bibliophiles and scholars. It has had an air of murkiness and desuetude'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/phantoms-of-the-mind