Talking Maps

Abstract

is limited. A non-European section might have been included and delineated in the volume. Throughout the volume, extensive footnotes testify to the scholarship of each of the contributors. However, a relevant set of appendices or detailed bibliographies after each of the sections might have included the full references of the chronicles and suggested secondary readings, both eastern and western (including Greek, Armenian, Syriac, Georgian, Slavonic, Venetian, Southern Italian, German, Arabic, Persian Ottoman, and Old Anatolian Turkish). Also, The Cambridge Companion might have considered it worth noting the list of the full titles of the chansons de geste, the Occitan troubadour cansos, the northern French trouvère lyrics, Anglo-Norman, Anglo-French, and more than forty Middle English romances concerning the Saracens and the crusades at the end of each relevant section or for further reading in the missing bibliography. The organisation of the volume is not very clear in the sense of the sectioning and ordering of chapters. The Introduction might have enhanced the sense of coherence that gives an impression of the collection of unrelated essays. While there are limitations to The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the Crusades, it significantly contributes to scholarship on crusading literature and its intersections with medieval studies. Such breadth is very welcome, not least as a means of encouraging further work. I suspect that the price will prevent the book from being bought by undergraduates (and most non-specialists in the non-European world), which is a shame. I will, however, be ordering it for the library and recommending it to my students.