Reviews for Saracens and the Making of English Identity: The Auchinleck Manuscript

The average rating for Saracens and the Making of English Identity: The Auchinleck Manuscript based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-03-07 00:00:00 Andie Nagel This is a really niche work designed for literary nerds who have decided that they're willing to pick up a book that spends a couple hundred pages talking about the meaning of one single Greek word in the Iliad. (Granted it's a really complicated word that's also the central theme of that work... but I digress.) I picked up this book in hopes that it would inform my understanding and teaching of the Iliad. I was successful in that regard. Granted, there's much more information in here than I can convey to a class of 9th grade students about the meaning of menis, but it gave me a fuller understanding of the work and how it was used so that I can best weave it into my curriculum and explanations to them. For myself, this work tended to be a bit too long and go down more rabbit trails than I would have cared for. I would probably have been fine with a book that's half as long. But my interests are more in high school education than in academics so in that regard, I'm not the ideal audience. While I don't know that I agreed with Muellner's literary interpretation of the Iliad (I think Achilles' attack on the Greek warrior ethic in his confrontation with Odysseus/Phoenix/Ajax is more relevant than Muellner indicates), his unpacking of the meaning of menin was rather valuable, and I was glad to have read this work. Rating: 4 Stars (Very Good).

Review # 2 was written on 2017-07-07 00:00:00 Brent Dunlevy This was not what I was expecting. I thought this would be a collection of legends and stories about Arthur. It is actually a study of the creation of Arthur mythology and an attempt to trace the actual historical figure of Arthur, which could also be interesting, but in this case it was very dry and drawn out.