Reviews for Michaud's History of the Crusades V2

The average rating for Michaud's History of the Crusades V2 based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-01-27 00:00:00 Scott Short This is a great resource for anyone who wants to learn more about Merlin's appearances throughout the immense body of Arthurian work and his evolution across it. As with all Arthurian characters, he is introduced by an author who has a particular goal for him (to use his prophecies to establish a noble history to the Britons and their rulers), and then other authors pick up aspects of Merlin and discard others based on the socially appropriate morals of the time being written in, with each author both consistently moving forward with their own cultural context while being able to reference back to the whole body of work so far. With almost 1000 years of writing and vastly different social mores, this zig-zag back and forth of new things getting added and old things getting written out then written back in is bound to happen. This book does a great job of tracing what's picked up where, what gets absorbed into popular culture/folklore of the time, and what gets deliberately discarded by whom and why. (For example, early on Merlin's written as the child of a devil, so that he can fulfill the "boy with no father" role, but the time period being very religious, in order for him to be a positive figure, he has to be purified by his mother's morality and choose to use his powers for God and be a very religious being himself. Then later, the mentions of the devil and his origins are dropped entirely, and his downfall by Nimue/Vivian is emphasized because the view of magic had become much more black/white and so the fact he was a magician meant that for things to feel right he had to be 'undone' by his own magic etc). In addition, this is written in a very clear and readable style. Ashe has been writing on Arthurian history, literary, and archaeological traditions for 52 years and he is easily able to explain his points. The text doesn't have a great deal of academic jargon in it, and Ashe doesn't assume that readers necessarily have a full background and does his best to fill in references he makes by describing the history around new things he wants to discuss. The downside is that, to this end, he both sometimes overexplains things in tangents and does not make it clear when he is returning from those tangents. Some examples: * When describing Merlin (in Geoffrey of Monmouth's account) discussing getting the stones of the "giants crown" from Ireland to move it to where it will eventually become Stonehenge, he goes on a long tangent about giants from other cultures and then makes the point that they are "irrelevant here", where giants weren't like that culturally. It meant I had to try to mentally dump information I'd just made a note of. * He talks about how Geoffrey of Monmouth wouldn't use material from early Welsh Arthurian tales such as Culhwch and Olwen due to it not fitting his needs of what he was setting up (it's pretty gory, gruesome, and wild), and then gave a full multi-page plot summary of it. In addition, he's so engaged in telling you the literary tradition AND the historical tradition AND the archaeological record that it can be sometimes hard to tell when he jumps between them. For example: * Ashe describes how in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Life of Merlin, Merlin meets the poet Taliesin, who is an actual historical figure, then jumps to sharing some of the historical Taliesin's poems, and then jumps right back to Taliesin talking to Merlin. The fact he IS talking to Merlin clued me in fast that we were back into Life of Merlin, but going from historical Taliesin talking -> literary Taliesin talking without much of a segue made it hard for me to mentally sort each part into its appropriate 'category'. * He goes into depth during the Geoffrey of Monmouth section about Merlin's prophecies, and the historical goal that Geoffrey of Monmouth had here to build out a noble bloodline for the Britons to elevate them culturally and so mixed in some 'verifiable' prophecies (since he was writing them from 600 years after Merlin was making them) with some incoherent ones. Then, still in this section (and thus before we've got to Ashe's section on Wace's translation and expansion) explains how Wace would later dump the prophecies because he couldn't interpret them. The tl;dr is it's a VERY good book but despite the clear narrative style, you'll want to put aside time to make notes and pay attention because there's a few trailing tangents and back and forth across different literary authors, archaeological commentary, and historical analysis that can trip you up if you're not attentive. 4 stars.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-04-10 00:00:00 Michael Atherton Ashe produced his first book on the Arthurian legends – King Arthur’s Avalon – in 1957, and over half a century later he still returns to the Matter of Britain, most recently in this overview of Merlin (first published in 2006 as a hardback by Sutton, now subsumed into The History Press). In his own words Ashe “traces the evolution of the legend, the growth of Merlin as a character, his possible historical aspect, and the principal treatments of him in literature,” and adds a supplementary list of modern transformations. There is a select group of illustrations which reflect different aspects of Merlin’s developing story, and a useful bibliography (would, however, that it had been divided up into fiction and non-fiction). Ashe was famously described as a “middlebrow” author, and here he writes with his customary confidence, born of long familiarity with the material, eschewing scholarly references (or even, disappointingly, an index) and revisiting old themes of his. As always, he writes with flair and ease, and there is the usual oblique approach to some of the strands he teases out which means the subject is illuminated as if by flashes of lightning. A useful introduction this, but for more detailed argument you would have to go elsewhere. This is, above all, a personal response, as befits someone who lives in Glastonbury, that most legendary of Arthurian places, on a site subsequently chosen as Merlin’s “nest” by the romantic novelist Persia Woolley.