The Cambridge Illustrated Atlas of Warfare: The Middle Ages 768-1487 (review)

Reviews 169 Hooper, Nicholas and Matthew Bennett, The Cambridge Illustrated Atlas of Warfare: The Middle Ages 768-1487, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996; cloth; pp. 192; c. 60 illustrations, including c. 50 in colour, c. 100 maps and battle plans; R.R.P. AUS$64.95. It appears that for Cambridge University Press, the word 'atlas' has becom something of afloatingsignifier, for after reading a portion of Hooper and Bennett's The Cambridge Illustrated Atlas of Warfare: The Middle Ages, 768-1487 I found myself going to the Oxford English Dictionary to see if an atlas is indeed supposed to be a book of maps. There I was given a measure of reassurance: atlas sb 3 'a collection of maps in a volume'. While this Illustrated Atlas does have a good m a n y maps in it, the emphasis is on written text; overall, the volume is not substantively different in format or approach from the medieval section of the recent Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare, reviewed by Toby Burrows in Parergon 14.2, January 1997. The strengths of the Illustrated Atlas are the same as those of the Illustrated History as described by Burrows: it is written by experts, the design is of a very high standard, and the illustrations, nearly all in colour, are beautifully reproduced. The text is divided into two main sections of one-hundred-and-forty and sixteen pages respectively, followed by a glossary, suggestions for further reading, and an eight-page chronology chart. In the twenty-four chapters of the main section, Hooper and Bennett provide a well-informed and straightforward chronological account of the wars fought by and in the countries of western Europe over a seven-hundred year span, although ten pages or so of actual text per century are obviously going to result in severe restrictions to the amount of detail that can be given. As the authors state in their introduction, they 'have been extremely selective in deciding the scope of this book, and have restricted the subject material to western Europe and Latin Christendom', as they did not wish to write about areas in which they 'did not have some degree of expertise as historians'. Hence they have chosen, as the a quo and ad quern of their study, the period from Charlemagne 's conquest of Aquitaine in 768 to the Battle of East Stoke in 1487, when Henry VII fought his last pitched engagement against a rival claimant to the English crown. While the authors' honesty about their o w n interests and limitations is to be commended, they have not succeeded in justifying (to m e at least) their selection of what to, and not to, include. To call this book 'Anglocentric' would be a major understatement, as the emphasis on England is positively overwhelming. In this first historical section, there are chapters on The Danish Conquest of England, The Norman Conquest of England, Thirteenth-Century English Civil Wars, England and the Celtic Fringe: Colonial Warfare, and the Wars of the Roses, along with two chapters on the Hundred Years War. Indeed, there are more pages devoted to military campaigns in the British Isles then 170 Reviews are given to all of the Crusades, and of the seventy maps included, by m y quick count, thirty-two (nearly half) are of England or Ireland. Unfortunately, the maps are the least satisfactory part of this section of the Atlas. With few exceptions, they are of large areas, say all of France or England, and the very small scale (1 cm. to 50 to 100 km.) means an absence of detail that might have shown the elements of geography so important to war—the type of terrain, density of population, fordability ofriversor the location of bridges, and what was most crucial to any campaign, the network of good roads and navigable rivers enabling an expeditionary force to be supplied at some distance from its home base. Instead, there are coloured lines everywhere, ten or fifteen to a map, each representing the movement of a specific army or detachment, and as one m a p covers several years or more or warfare, the lines often intersect with each other...