Bernard McGinn

Violence and Spirituality: The Enigma of the First Crusade

ulated a spate of accounts among Latin authors and was also reported upon by Byzantine and Arabic historians, as well as by some important and innovative Jewish chronicles. All these accounts have been well known and much studied for almost a century now. But lest one think that the First Crusade is a dead subject, these two recent books demonstrate, in interesting and overlapping ways, just how important, revealing, and tragic an event it was in medieval religious history. Since the publication of Steven Runcimans three-volume History of the Crusades,I the history of the Crusading movement has tended to move away from the older story of military campaigns, political machinations, and biographies of leaders toward a broader treatment both of the phenomenon of the Crusade and of the society it produced. Joshua Prawer and an innovative group of Israeli historians have been in the forefront of study of the protocolonial society set up by the Crusaders in the East; both European and American historians have contributed much to the study of Crusader institutions, Crusading policy, and even the criticism of the Crusades in recent years. Nor have historians forgotten that, whatever else they were, the Crusades were also religious events. Perhaps the disturbing rise in religiously motivated violence and war in the Middle East during the past four decades has had something to do with this new historiography, but recent concern for the history of medieval forms of lay piety also has played a role. The study of the Crusade as a religious event was initiated by one of the classics of twentieth-century Crusade historiography, Carl Erdmanns Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens of 1935, translated into English in

Renaissance, Humanism, and the Interpretation of the Twelfth Century

The temptation to characterize centuries under handy rubrics is not peculiar to historians of any age. Nonetheless, there are times when the yielding seems decidedly more prevalent than the resisting. The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century by Charles Homer Haskins, first published in 1927, is a good example of a genre surprisingly popular in the early twentieth century that has continued to maintain its vitality down to the present (a paperback edition of the work is still in print). Aside from its popularity, one might well ask how much difference there is between Haskinss book and the now unread work of James J. Walsh, The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries (1907). The similarities are striking, not only in the naively optimistic attitude each author took toward his subject, but also in the method employed, that of the endless accumulation of every seemingly relevant detail. Haskins, of course, was a Harvard professor, the dean of American medievalists, and a man who wrote several far better books (notably Studies in the History of Medieval Science), while Walsh was a Catholic publicist of more reduced academic standing whose deficiencies are all too evident in his most noted book. And then

The Editors' Bookshelf: Medieval Religious History

Thomas von Aquin. Vol. 2: Philosophische Fragen. Edited by Klaus Bernath. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981. Wege der Forschung, Band 538. viii + 572 pp. DM 132. Nineteen classic essays (all in German) on aspects of the philosophy of the Angelic Doctor. CHAZAN, ROBERT. Church, State, and Jew in the Middle Ages. New York: Behrman House, 1980. xii + 340 pp.

Ocean and Desert as Symbols of Mystical Absorption in the Christian Tradition

9.95. A collection of translations of important sources dealing with the legal position of the Jews in medieval society between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries.