Each of these two books comprises papers presented at the 2008 meeting of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East (SSCLE) on the topic of ‘the papacy and the crusades’. Together they demonstrate the astonishing variety of themes and methodologies characteristic of modern crusader studies, including military history, archaeological research, economic and political history and theological and liturgical studies. As coherent essay collections, however, these volumes are less successful.

Many of the problems grow out of fundamental editorial decisions, particularly with La Papauté et les croisades. The papers in that volume have gone through varying levels of revision and differ significantly in terms of length, degree of footnoting and basic points of style. The quality of copyediting, is also extremely erratic. This inconsistent presentation is unfortunate, since it risks consigning to obscurity several fine and provocative papers. Benjamin Weber's essay in La Papauté et les croisades, for example, demonstrates the surprising rarity of the word ‘crusade’ in medieval papal documents. The first pope to use it was Boniface viii in the year 1300, and it did not appear again in papal records until 1436. When it did, the word ‘crusade’ referred not to holy wars themselves but rather to the indulgences associated with such wars. In a related essay, Giulio Cipollone makes a fine presentation of the rapid proliferation, beginning in the thirteenth century, of the phrase ‘to take the cross’, indicating the increasing flexibility, and perhaps decadence, of the crusading concept in the later Middle Ages. Marco Meschini's delightfully titled paper, ‘‘‘Smoking sword”: le meurtre du légat Pierre de Castelnau et la première croisade alibgeoise’, highlights the deliberate use of misleading propaganda in the papal call to crusade against heresy in 1208. Specifically, Meschini suggests that the murder of Peter Castlenau was not the immediate cause for the Albigensian Crusade as historians usually assume, but was rather a justification for a military action upon which Innocent iii had already decided. David Perry's essay on Venice makes an important contribution to the burgeoning field of ‘crusade memory’, showing how in the Venetian consciousness the city's role as a mediator between Frederick Barbarossa and Alexander iii gradually transformed into a full-fledged crusading enterprise. Isabelle Augé's illuminating study of Archbishop Nersês of Tarsus provides a fascinating analysis of a little-known ecclesiastical leader as well as of twelfth-century Armenian attitudes toward Latin crusader states.

On the margins of crusading is more focused in terms of subject matter and as a result more successful as an essay collection . At the heart of the book are six very strong papers on the Templars, their dissolution, and the subsequent papal programme of reorganisation for the Hospitallers. The book's other five essays are more narrowly focused and likely to be of interest only to specialist readers. Given the uneven quality and scope of the papers in both volumes, one must suspect that scholars would benefit from less comprehensive presentations of SSCLE proceedings and from volumes subject to more selective and rigorous editorial processes.