If you are a connoisseur of beautiful books, Taschen are the publishers to go to... Now they've done something Outremer-friendly! I picked up this gem in the university bookshop while sheltering from the rain at lunchtime: Sébastien Mamerot: A Chronicle of the Crusades. It's a translation of a 1470s history of Outremer, with the original MS ( Read more... )

Rare and ancient manuscripts deliberately burned in Mosul.

Have been on a bit of a Saladin kick, what with David Nicolle's new book. Osprey has started doing a series on commanders, and old Joey is one of them! I recommend it thoroughly, although (as usual) Conrad only gets about 4 lines in it. (Grrr!) I was intrigued to find it actually names his younger sister, al-Sitt Rabi'a Khatun, as the lady who ( Read more... )

Yesterday I got my seasonal gifts from my friends in Monferrato. The Circolo Culturale has been busy publishing, and I can heartily recommend:
Walter Haberstumpf, Regesti dei Marchesi di Monferrato (secoli IX-XVI)
ed. Roberto Maestri, Bonifacio, Marchese di Monferrato, Re di Tessalonica: Atti del Convegno Internazionale and Carducci e gli Aleramici ( Read more... )

Byzantine Cavalryman c.900-1204 has now been added to the excellent Osprey series! They already had infantry volumes. This covers our time-period, and if it's as good as the others, should be very useful!

I remember, as an undergraduate c. 1983, owning a slim little book called What Were the Crusades? by Jonathan Riley-Smith. It was still in its first edition in those days. It is now in its brand-new fourth edition (2009), and is a bit fatter (and more expensive), but is definitely worth having, especially for its series of prefaces, in which he ( Read more... )

I am pleased to report that Alain Demurger has brought out a new edition of his biography of Jacques de Molay, The Last Templar. It includes a new Epilogue in which he lays into last year's hype over the Chinon Parchment, pointing out that its contents have been known for a longg time from other reports, and that Dr Frale found the original MS in ( Read more... )

Copied from medievalstudies:
BESANT W. PALMER E. Jerusalem, the city of Herod and Saladin, London 1871.

Beware, though: 19C Romanticism!

K M Grant, The Blood Red Horse, children's novel about the Third Crusade. ( Read more... )

Bill Putnam & John Edwin Wood, The Treasure of Rennes-le-Château: A Mystery Solved , is a splendid book I picked up in Oxfam the other day. It dissects effectively the pseudo-historical nonsense propagated by Lincoln & co and popularised further by Brown, which dragged the poor old Templars and others further into the realms of fantasy. I was ( Read more... )