Professional Historians are prone to complain how ineffective students are at reading source texts. This is unfair. How quickly we forget the time and effort it took us to learn these skills long ago. Learning how to read towards decisions on what to conclude from the reading (source criticism) is no simple matter. This course certainly hopes to assist in the learning process. Its goal is not to spit out future graduate students, teacher's clones. Quod absit! (God forbid!), as the Latin chroniclers say! Indeed, one selling-point is that the course may just turn the occasional would-be professional medievalist off: Yes, loads of fun, but no way to spend a life.
No, the point is that source-criticism (which is fun by the way) is very useful in the world outside, to read newspapers, to decide what you can trust from the media's lies, and generally to equip you with the power first of sifting the truth out of the bombardment of marketing and propaganda, and then to report your findings. This was sharply brought home to me a while back when Leslie Stahl did an item on the Web in "Sixty Minutes". She was appalled when a Web guru showed her how easy it is to put pernicious lies up on the Web and then cover your tracks. (He told her he could even make her page, newly invented while we watched, appear to come out of the White House if she wished!) Her reaction was to ask if the Web ought not to be regulated. The answer was that the task is impossible, but the guru went on to argue that the First Amendment ought to apply here if anywhere. And he made the point that people must learn not to believe information just because it appears on a nice, pretty Web page. I agree. Of course the same applies to other media, to newspapers, TV and even to my own handouts and lectures! Caveat lector! (Reader beware, or, as I like to add, Caveat reticulator!.) We need source criticism techniques in real life quite as much as historians do. This is a skill worth acquiring.
When you are faced by some historical text, your first job is to decide why you are reading it. In other words one needs to have in mind questions worth answering. The process is very much like that of questioning witnesses in a lawsuit. But in that situation, the initial questions are obvious. You question to elicit information and stucture within which you (or your client) will look innocent or aggrieved. You have your starting-point ready-made. Historians may have some ready-made questions too. And many of us (sometimes too many) approach sources with "library" questions formed already out of our world-view. (Why were people so slow to see the virtues of a free market? Why do men always exploit women? Why are Europeans such exploitative colonialists? Why do Christians find it so hard to live up to Christ's ideal? or Why do Christians talk "the other cheek" but act with the sword? etc. etc.) It is in part to avoid sins of this kind that we read secondary materials, what earlier historians have written. From them we discover the questions they asked, and generate questions of our own that they ought to have asked, and might have done had they enjoyed our own advantages of gender, time (e.g. post-Communism, after the fall of the Berlin Wall), technical resources (e.g. psychology, computer models etc.).
The nub of the matter is first questions, then intelligent reading techniques, then more questions.
Class instruction will include suggestions about how most effectively to read, in order to maximize your gains. We shall also cooperate in class (including some work in pairs) and pool our questions. Section I of the course should illustrate the basic techniques. It uses a text-base (HIDES = HIstorical Document Expert System) covering most of the sources pertinent to recent controversy about the First Crusade and the origins of the Idea of Crusade. The (non-impartial) compilers pose some initial questions (the -HQS file), which you should work through at your own pace, recording your suggested answers in an on-disk Notebook. To help you in this, both the HIDES program and the associated Wordcruncher (WCVLtd) software offer various search aids. But the essential decisions remain yours, to form and argue your own view. Just like any professional historian, though simplified by lying within a carefully circumscribed compass.
Armed with what you have gained here, we move on in Section II to examine a sample crusade (the Second), something of the creation and development of the First Kingdom of Jerusalem (died 1187), and one of the greatest of all witnesses to the Latin Middle Ages, William, archbishop of Tyre and chancellor of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Section III will take on the rather different circumstances of some 13th-Century crusades and their relation to the Second Kingdom. We shall read and set against each other two different western views of the notorious Fourth Crusade. That "Deviation" (to Constantinople) led to successive Egypt Crusades, each described by a very accessible participant's account. In between, you can try out the "Empathy" approach on the so-called Children's Crusade. Then, in Section IV we get to read, thanks to the kindness of Niall Christie one of the translators, the first known Islamic discussion of the concept of jihad written in the aftermath of the disasters of our "First Crusade". The obvious contrasts in viewpoint help to set off the impact of the crusades on Western mentalité and general culture. But perhaps there are also equally telling comparisons of approach. Finally in Section V, we shall try to draw together the semester's lessons and hazard an assessment of the crusading tradition of western historical writing, and pose some of the Big Questions, such as: Was the First Crusade the only "real" Crusade? Were the Crusades just an early manifestation of Western Imperialism? And as a positively last question, perhaps: How do you feel now about Edward Said's "Orientalism"?