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220 Reviews to the true significance of the anit-magnate measures of the 1280s and 1290s have a bearing on the inferences to be drawn from Lansing's findings. Are we dealing here with what could meaningfuUy be described as a class or merely with more unruly elements in the ceto dirigente or governing group, the remainder of which continued to dominate Florentine politics? In view of the arbitrary and politically coloured nature of the designation "magnate", it might have been advisable to have broadened this study to take in all of what historians writing on later periods have called the city's patriciate. A n examination of the thirteenth-century equivalent of this would not only have provided a more balanced picture of the Florentine aristocracy but also have helped to clarify the question of the extent to which it can be said to have conesponded with those families included in the magnate lists of the 1290s. Despite this minor reservation, this work can be recommended as an able and revealing exploration of the character and mentality of the magnates as a social group. Given the tendancy of post-war English speaking historians to concern themselves with Florentine history mainly from 1343 onwards, it is also a welcome addition (together with George Holmes' Florence, Rome and the origins of the Renaissance) to the literature available in our language on what is arguably a period of critical importance for the shaping of the society, culture, and constitution of Florence Louis Green Department of History Monash University Lawrence, T. E., Crusader castles, new edition with introduction and notes by Denys Pringle, rpt Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990; cloth; pp. xl, 154; 108 plates and figures, 2 maps; R.R.P. AUS$92.50. At the turn of the century, when as an undergraduate at Oxford T. E. Lawrence became interested in medieval military fortifications in England, France, and the Crusader East the canonical thesis was that the rapid elaboration and increasing sophistication of castie design in the West and the Crusader states from the twelfth century owed much to emulation of Byzantine and Muslim fortresses both by the Franks in Syria and Palestine and also by Crusaders returning to the West. But as Pringle comments drily, 'Few of the scholars who wrote with such apparent authority of the importance of Crusader casdes for the development of fortification techniques in Europe had ever been to the Levant let alone seen a Crusader castle' (p. xxiv). Lawrence was atieady famtiiar with castles in England and France from cycling tours before he went up to Oxford and he extended his knowledge of France by a cycling tour in tbe summer of 1908. By then he had decided to present a thesis for his final examination in History on the influence of the Crusades on military architecture Reviews 221 and to this end he undertook a three-month tour of Syria and Palestine in the summer of 1909. The thesis which he presented for examination in 1910 set out to challenge the canonical view and to argue that the development of Crusader and Western casdes owed little to Eastern influences. It was regarded so highly that one examiner wanted the University Press to publish it. However, the cost of reproducing its many illustrations prevented this happening and it did not appear in print until a limited edition was published by the Golden Cockerel Press in 1936, a year after Lawrence's death. This edition has long been unobtainable and Denys Pringle's new edition (1988) was therefore very welcome. This edition contains not only thetextof the examiners' copy of the thesis but also an extensive introduction by Pringle examining Lawrence's ideas in the tight of m o d e m scholarship, notes from marginal comments made later by Lawrence on both the examiners' copy of the thesis and also on an earlier rough draft, editorial notes by Pringle including updated bibliographical references, some additional plates, an extract from another preliminary draft of the thesis (1909-10) deposited amongst Lawrence's papers in the Bodleian which states his ideas very succincdy, a letter of 1911 on the strategic siting of Crusader casdes, and extracts from a...

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