Montjoie: Studies in Crusade History in Honour of Hans Eberhard Mayer (review)

260 Reviews believed in his genre's capacity to define truths; indeed one might well argue that satire of this period is in fact characterized by an anxious awareness of the slippery boundaries between satire and libel. Furthermore, despite the book's claim to examine a 'culture of slander', Kaplan's rather traditional analytical practices fail to consider potentially significant issues of readership. Jonson, for example, claims a position of truth, but one might well ask whether this claim was ever accepted unquestioningly by his audiences. There is, for example, m u c h evidence that contemporary readers appreciated the contestatory nature of libellous poems, and appreciated also that reputations were malleable rather than fixed. A more substantial cultural study of slander might well step beyond the canonical texts and explore some of these concerns. There is certainly m u c h w o r k that might be done on defamation in the early modern era; however, while The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England identifies some important issues, it makes only a small contribution to our appreciation of this field. Its achievement falls short of the promise in its broad and ambitious title. Andrew McRae Department of English University of Sydney Kedar, Benjamin Z., Jonathan Riley-Smith and Rudolf Hiestand, Montjoie: Studies in Crusade History in Honour of Hans Eberhard Mayer, Aldershot, Variorum, 1997; cloth; pp. xx, 276; 15 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £45.00. The study of the crusades and the medieval crusader states in th Eastern Mediterranean has grown and flourished since the 'fifties, Reviews 261 attracting a large number of fine scholars from all over the world, although the most notable concentration has perhaps been in the British Isles. Despite this, there is no single journal, or even small group of journals, which provides the main venue for publishing new work in thefield.Rather, in the last two decades, m u c h of that function has been served by collections of articles published in book form. M a n y of the most important have been proceedings from the conferences of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East. In the same period, the Variorum imprint has also been assiduous in collecting the scattered journal articles published by individual scholars in thefield,and reprinting them in convenient volumes, with original pagination intact. Montjoie, appropriately enough given itstitle,represents the apex of these scholarly traditions of research and publication. A festschrift in honour of magisterial G e r m a n scholar Hans Eberhard Mayer, published by an English company, its three editors, each of different nationalities, are themselves highly respected in the field. A worthy tribute to Mayer's range and depth of achievement, its eighteen articles allow an overview of the strengths of the field, as well as containing significant n e w work by a large proportion of the most important figures of the last several decades. In their opening appreciation of Hans Mayer, Riley-Smith, Kedar, and Hiestand point out that his work has always had its roots in his training as a 'Monumentist ,' focussing on the particulars without losing sight of the panorama...Mayer turned his back on the Trird's-eye view' of the constitution [of the Kingdom of Jerusalem], the wide-ranging interest in tracing developments over two centuries, and in a series of outstanding articles concentrated instead on studies of lordships and families on the ground, where naturally the weakness in, and the deficiencies of, a general model came to be most exposed. He is the chief architect of a historiographical revolution, (p. viii) 262 Reviews Most of the articles published here likewise indicate the strengths of such an approach, and work in the tradition of Mayer's historiographical and methodological revolution; indeed, several of the contributors, including Riley-Smith himself, James Brundage, and Jean Richard, could make a claim to being co-architects. The majority of the pieces are satisfying, neatly delineated studies of small questions or issues, working closely with a well-defined corpus of source material, yet aware of the wider implications of their conclusions. Thus, for example, Kedar in 'A Western Survey of Saladin's Forces...