Riley-Smith on the Crusades

It seems to me -- and has seemed to me for a while -- that a distressing large number of educated and engaged people have embraced -- either uncritically or insufficiently critically -- inaccurate and often tendentious narratives about historical events, developments, and personalities involving the Church.  Whether the question involves the causes and characteristics of the so-called "Dark Ages" or the rise of America's common-school system, it too often seems that an I-would-have-thought-by-now-discredited-or-at-least-problematized "whiggish" bias shapes the telling of the relevant stories and that even Catholics (perhaps in an effort to over-compensate for some other Catholics' "triumphalism") buy and repeat them.

So, I'm reading this summer (among other things) Jonathan Riley-Smith's The Crusades:  A History (buy it here), and encourage other Catholics who aspire to an accurate (and therefore instructive) understanding of the past to read it, too.  At the very least, the book helps with the task of ministering to the poor souls who sat through Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven (link).

Here, by the way, is a review by the great scholar of late antiquity, Robert Louis Wilken, of two other Crusades-related books:

. . . The recorded past and the remembered past are seldom the same. Nowhere is this more evident than with the Crusades. . . .

[T]he "remembered" history of the Crusades might better be called an imagined or invented history. Mr. Asbridge, a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, puts it this way: The Crusades "have come to have a profound bearing upon our modern world, but almost entirely through the agency of illusion." Mr. Phillips, a professor of history at Royal Holloway University of London, says that we have seen only "shadows of the crusades, not true shapes." . . .