This volume contains the proceedings of an international conference held at the Danish Institute in Damascus on 5–9 October 2009. All the papers are in English except for one in German. As the book's title implies, cultural encounters can include cultural conflict, and one such conflict took place only eight hours before the start of the conference when the Syrian Ministry of Culture actually banned it. It did so in the mistaken belief that Professor Jensen's paper on the American political consultant Samuel Huntingdon was a defence of his views, finally agreeing to the conference going ahead only if Jensen did not read his paper, which none the less has been printed in the proceedings reviewed here.

These proceedings ambitiously seek to cover two distinct but overlapping fields, cultural encounters and crusade history. The studies mainly encompass the eastern Mediterranean and Baltic seas geographically and the period from around 1100 to the late fifteenth century chronologically. None the less, Paul Chevedden's paper on the view of crusades from Rome and Damascus discusses Latin expansion in Sicily and Spain in the writings of Pope Urban ii and Al-Sulami, a Muslim philologist from Damascus. Bertil Nilsson's study on how pagans and infidels are described in Gratian's twelfth-century Decretum discusses letters and texts of popes Leo the Great (440–60), Gregory the Great (590–604) and Nicholas i (858–67) while the two final papers, by Robert Irwin and Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, discuss twentieth-century topics, namely Arabists and Crusader Studies and how the crusades in Syria and Egypt are portrayed on Arab television and in films.

Of the eighteen papers published, excluding the introduction, three discuss the Baltic. Torben Kjersgaard Nielsen's paper on Henry of Livonia's narrative of how pagans and Orthodox Russians interacted with German Roman Catholic missionaries in Livonia, with its gruesome accounts of pagan tortures inflicted on Christian converts and the amusing contradiction in Henry's characterisation of the Russian Orthodox Church as a ‘barren mother’ reminds us that the encounters were not bi-polar, Latin Christians versus pagans, but also involved the Orthodox. Janus Moller Jensens's paper on King Eric Emune and the crusades astutely describes how crusading ideology was a weapon used not only against refractory pagans but also Christian opponents in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Scandinavia. Helle Vogt's paper on legal encounters in Estonia makes the interesting observation that, notwithstanding Danish rule, Estonian law from the thirteenth century onwards was based on the Livonian law of the Roman Catholic military order of the Sword Brothers, with the Ordeal by Fire introduced, despite its prohibition during the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, as being suitable for a newly-converted and conquered people.

Several papers besides some of those mentioned above discuss cultural encounters in a legal framework. Kirsi Salonen's paper discusses the powers of the fifteenth-century Apostolic Penitentiary regarding the commutation of crusade or pilgrimage vows, licences for pilgrimages to the Holy Land and absolution for forbidden commerce with Muslims. Christian Hogel's paper on the Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus' failed attempt to moderate the abjuration formula employed by Muslim converts to Orthodox Christianity, so that they would not specifically condemn the ‘solid’ (holosphyros) God of Muhammad, a venture blocked by the Byzantine clergy, illustrates how then as now attempts at cultural accommodation were opposed as being tantamount to capitulation. Hubert Kaufhold's paper (in German) on the influence of Islam on the legal literature of the eastern Christians in Syria presciently observes how in Europe an erroneous form of cultural and geographical stereotyping equates Christendom with the West and Islam with the East. Peter Edbury's paper on two prominent Frankish jurists, John of Jaffa and Philip of Novara, states what their legal treatises reveal regarding relations between Franks and others, showing a hierarchy of Franks, Syrian Melkites, Greeks, non-Chalcedonian Christians and Muslims in descending order.

Four papers discuss cultural encounters in medieval Muslim and Western literature. Jonathan Phillips's paper on the twelfth-century Andalusian and Sunni Muslim traveller Ibn Jubayr discusses how the Muslim Near East that he depicted was politically and religiously fractious, with significant Christian and especially Shi'a Muslim groupings. Helen Nicholson's paper states how Muslim warriors were depicted as militarily and sometimes morally superior to their Latin Christian counterparts in thirteenth-century Western literature, the authors of which thereby criticised their own societies. Sini Kangas's paper on twelfth-century crusader narratives has a similar theme, although here the Latin Christian warrior outmatches the Saracen enemy because, unlike the latter, he has both valour and the Christian faith. Turning to twelfth- and thirteenth-century Muslim jihad poetry, Osman Latif's paper explains how by invoking the belief in divine predestination (qadr), utilising Qur'anic imagery, emphasising the importance of liberating Jerusalem and presenting the warriors Nur al-Din and Saladin as prioritising the jihad against the Franks Muslim poets heightened awareness of and resistance to the Latin presence in the Holy Land.

Such resistance did not preclude shared religious sites. Muslims were present at sites frequented by Christians like the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the tombs of the Virgin Mary and St Lazarus, and even at Christian festal processions, as Andrew Jotischky observes in his paper, while explaining that they were present as onlookers or, in the case of Muslim emirs, to supervise proceedings. In the only paper on Cilician Armenia Angus Stuart recounts how the Armenians exaggerated both the efficacy of their Mongol alliance against the Mamluk sultanate and their own role in it to impress the Latins, while the Mongols themselves in embassies to the West likewise overstated their Christian sympathies. Kurd Villad Jensen's own paper, published here although not read at the conference, warns against simplistically seeing Christian-Muslim relations as a clash of civilisations and compares Samuel Huntingdon and Pope Urban ii in their zeal and uncompromising attitude towards the perceived enemy. In sum, these papers constitute an engrossing and multifaceted approach to cultural encounters within the context of crusades, although cross-cultural encounters and influences in weaponry and the art of making war are not covered.