Welsh Journals

graphical traditions. Where the Welsh and Irish have led, it is to be hoped that the Scots and perhaps eventually even the English will follow. The collection begins with a new essay, 'The "Failure" of the First English Conquest of Ireland', which is less successful than one might have hoped in linking the themes of the pieces that follow. It is important, however, in locating Frame's approach to his subject. He is, he tells us (p.7), 'a historian born in Protestant Belfast' and the historians of medieval Ireland he admires most are G. H. Orpen and A. J. Otway-Ruthven. He is less in sympathy with the scholars who preceded and succeeded Otway- Ruthven in the chair of medieval history at Frame's alma mater, Trinity College, Dublin, Edmund Curtis and J. F. Lydon. Herein lies the reason why the relationship between the colonists and the native Irish is a subject not covered more extensively in Frame's work. In 'War and Peace in the Medieval Lordship of Ireland', he suggests that 'the truth probably is that the feudal and Gaelic worlds were from the start closer to each other than their respective sources readily disclose' (p. 226), but this insight is not followed up and he is far too dismissive of the idea that a 'Middle Nation' based on mutual cultural assimilation of native and newcomer was evident in some arenas from the fourteenth century (p. 144). Such criticisms do not detract from what is a consistently challenging, well-written and scholarly collection of essays. It should be read by anyone with an interest in Irish history, and is recommended with particular enthusiasm to historians of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England. BRENDAN SMITH Bristol THE Invention OF THE CRUSADES. By Christopher Tyerman. Macmillan, London, 1998. Pp.ix,170. £ 11.99 paperback. This stimulating book is, in the words of the author, 'a triptych' of essays. The first of these, 'Were there any Crusades in the Twelfth Century?', was originally published in the English Historical Review, 110 (1995), 553-77. Its basic argument is that crusading was then a rare and hardly distinct activity, being only dimly-if at all-distinguished from pilgrimage, on the one hand, and Holy War on the other. There follows an essay entitled 'Definition and Diffusion' in which Tyerman explores the way in which society in general viewed the crusade, and argues that modern scholars, misled by papal pronouncements, have adopted too monolithic a view. The third essay, 'Proteus Unbound: Crusading Historiography', examines the