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Jun 11 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Hi y'all. Let me offer a short Friday night reading list on the #crusades.

You need some good introductory texts. I love Jonathan Phillips' Holy Warriors as my western intro book, and Paul Cobb's Race for Paradise for an Islamic perspective. They're great.
Get Jay Rubenstein's Armies of Heaven for an extremely readable account of the apocalyptic First Crusade. And then get his Nebuchadnezzar's Dream for an excellent academic account of the apocalyptic aspects of the 12th and 13th century crusades.
I think @WilliamPurkis 's Crusading Spirituality in the Holy Land and Iberia is an absolute must read masterpiece.

Katherine Allen Smith's The Bible and Crusade Narrative in the 12th Century is SO GOOD and will transform the way you think of crusade chronicles.
@Gaposchkin 's Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology is another must read, utterly transformative book.

@prof_gabriele 's An Empire of Memory: the Legend of Charlemagne, the Franks and Jerusalem before the First Crusade is a personal favorite.
Pausing but not done.
Ok! Let's add some more. Ronnie Ellenblum's Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem is an excellent archaeological survey of how crusader villages actually functioned. Christopher MacEvitt's The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance
Doesna great job discussing the way crusaders interacted with local Christian populations. Tara Andrew's Mattʿēos Uṙhayecʿi and His Chronicle: History as Apocalypse in a Crossroads of Cultures discusses the Armenian chronicle of the early crusades, it is excellent.
I can suggest others later, but that's already a bunch of academic texts, ones I love and love to assign and teach.

I would like to add @BucPhilippe 's Holy War, Martyrdom and Terror, the book that inspired me to look at holy war from the crusades to present.
These are all books on the early crusades, my main medieval focus (I'm really 11th c. into early 12th), but the crusades last until 1798 and there are SO MANY GOOD BOOKS out there and also SO MUCH LEFT TO STUDY AND WRITE ABOUT.

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More from @tlecaque

Thomas Lecaque Profile picture
Jun 12
...I think I'm going to try and draft an intro piece on why we should be paying attention to Patriot Front and their ilk, not just for the aesthetic mockery, but for what they want and represent and how they're the tip of the iceberg.
The J6 Committee I think has thoroughly gotten us to realize how concerned we should be about militia groups like Oathkeepers and 3 Percenters, but the broad array of accelerationist fascist groups in this country should worry the hell out of us.
I worry about pushing the boundaries of my comfort zone, but I think "these people are serious, this is not the first time we've had to discuss them, and even if they fold they are just one of a number of American fascist movements and we should be paying attention" is ok.
Read 4 tweets
Thomas Lecaque Profile picture
Jun 12
Patriot Front are accelerationist fascists who want to start a shooting war. The uniforms are deliberate, as is the masking, as are their symbols, as are their targets. I know we like to make fun of them but these people are very, very serious and dangerous.
A ton of their internal communications and documents got leaked--they are organized and trying to recruit and organize even more, in every state. Their goals are exactly what you'd expect--it's murder, the violent dismantling of the state, the overthrow of democracy.
And those marches that we see clips of and people like to laugh about SERVE A PURPOSE. Processions are a political act, they are the claiming of legitimacy and also the claiming of space in the public sphere. They are a means of intimidation, propaganda, recruiting.
Read 6 tweets
Thomas Lecaque Profile picture
Jun 11
Hey if you're a grad student or early career academic or heck mid career like me and you constantly think your writing is garbage? I am really just now, like the last month, getting over feeling that way. Grad school messes you up in so many ways and this is one of them.
I feel like grad school was just a long journey of discovering new things to be anxious about or new ways to kick my self loathing into overdrive, and that seems to be grad school culture writ large.
Every seminar? Take a book a week, someone's life's work, and discover new and ever more vicious ways to shit on it. Constantly be terrified of all the things you don't know and worry people will find out. Second guess every argument you make.
Read 5 tweets
Thomas Lecaque Profile picture
Jun 10
So I am running a 4 hour one shot birthday #DnD adventure for my oldest and five of his friends, and we're using @HitPointPress 's Humblewood. I'm effectively taking the first mission of the premade campaign and kicking up the stakes.
The mission ending will emulate a simplified version of the ending of the campaign, the stakes of the smaller adventures will be amped up towards that end, and I'm going to make the Bandit Coalition a bigger part so there is more swashbuckling adventure.
It will end with the party sealing a crack in the seal holding back the aspect of fire--yes, I spend a lot of time thinking about my herniated disk in all contexts--using magical tools they gather over the first three hours.
Read 4 tweets
Thomas Lecaque Profile picture
Jun 10
1.#MAMG22 Fallout: New Vegas takes the player to the post-apocalyptic wastelands surrounding New Vegas—the desert, the hills, the neon lights guarded by robot sentinels, the forces of the NCR stretched on Hoover Dam, and the looming menace of the fascist Caesar’s Legion.
2.#MAMG22 Fallout games truck in neo-medievalism & Americana—retrofuturistic 1950s sci-fi Americana crumbling under the radiation, and the knights of the Brotherhood of Steel, in their plate man, paladins armed with laser gatlings, reminding us of the core fantasies of genre.
3.#MAMG22 The DLC “Honest Hearts,” though, takes the player out of the New Vegas Wasteland into Zion National Park, inhabited by a number of groups that the Fallout Universe describes as “tribals,” at term as problematic as you can imagine, & features extensive rock art.
Read 13 tweets
Thomas Lecaque Profile picture
Jun 9
This is crusade historian bingo, guys. I know Tom Madden. I like him as a person. He is exceptionally kind to graduate students and I love him for that. His popular crusade books, though, get cited routinely by Islamaphobes and hate groups and that's a problem.
And that's the thing. History is a discourse, and there are many sides to it, and there are many voices.

Madden's books on Venice? Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. Love them.

I don't use his general work on the crusades.
Now, use isn't intent. And that is very much not what I'm saying.

But when you are the only academic cited in Robert Spencer's Islamaphobe books about the crusades, well, that's not excellent.
Read 4 tweets

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