Helen J. Nicholson

Helen Nicholson's latest book provides a survey of women's involvement in the Crusades between the late eleventh and sixteenth centuries. Nicholson writes clearly and accessibly, and draws on a wide array of sources. While Women and the Crusades understandably focuses mostly on Christian women, Nicholson is also at pains to show how these events also shaped the lives of Jewish and Muslim women. This is a serviceable overview which I think will be of greatest use in demonstrating for the show more general reader that women truly were integral to a set of conflicts which are ever-present in popular culture and yet also widely misunderstood. show less

If the name of Sybil of Jerusalem is known to people at all today, it's thanks to the (highly fictionalized) version of her played by Eva Green in Ridley Scott's dubious 2005 historical epic Kingdom of Heaven. Here, Helen Nicholson tries to recover as much as we can about the life and career of the historic Sybil, a woman who for a brief time was the queen-regnant of Jerusalem.

There is, truthfully, very little we can say for certain. Sybil's reign was short, took place during a troubled show more period, and much of the documentation of it was destroyed along with the rest of the chancery holdings when the Crusader kingdom finally fell. This means that Nicholson has to try to provide a kind of photo-negative account of Sybil's life, tracing the actions and movements of those (mostly men) around her, and then trying to logically deduce where that meant Sybil probably was during such-and-such period. Nicholson is to be applauded for gathering together all the surviving crumbs about Sybil's short life—she was maybe 30 years old when she died—and for unpicking the legends which have grown up around Sybil over the centuries. Barring the highly unlikely discovery of some new cache of documentary evidence, Sybil of Jerusalem will probably be the go-to reference on this queen—but it's not particularly satisfying as a biography. show less

An outstanding book. I've found that the most informative and engaging pieces to read on history are chronicles written during the events or shortly thereafter. This one was written by someone who was there and participated in the 3rd Crusade.
It is filled with accounts of battles and personal acts of bravery and combat. One also gets a better idea of what the average crusader/pilgrim suffered through to make such a monumental journey. The modern reader is struck by the enormous energy, show more money, and time spent on this campaign and the realization that it had been repeated many times over all over the world throughout history. It is almost difficult for one to wrap their brain around it.
A very good read, one of the best I've run across in a while, and I would recommend it to anyone. In fact, it should be a requisite for the serious student. show less

Not a narrative history of the religious order, but a wide-ranging description of what their lives must have been like, how their organisation was structured, and how they were viewed by their contemporaries (marred only by excessive and pedantic debunking of the legal charges that led to their downfall). 4/5