PositiveThe New Republic...[an] excellent history ... The World of the Crusades is an extraordinarily fulsome study of a fascinatingly nihilistic struggle, and anybody would benefit from its readable pages. But its lesson is negative, since Tyerman essentially sets out to prove, at enormous length, that the Crusades do not mean what many people think they mean. It is unclear whether negative lessons have any corrective power in our new information world, where every data point can be as valuable as another, regardless of origin. Tyerman’s lesson is a simple one, which modern scholars must cling to like so many shipwrecked sailors: History is a methodology and nothing more.
