The history of the Crusades, like any other, is contested territory among historians. It isn’t my area, but the two very distinguished historians of the Crusades with whose work I am even somewhat familiar–Jonathan Riley-Smith and Christopher Tyerman–take different approaches to their subject. Professor Riley-Smith’s view focuses on the distinctively religious, and righteously religious, component of the Crusades–the Crusades not as occasion for plunder and subjugation but quite the opposite: as just defensive wars and religiously motivated pilgrimages that were often financially and personally ruinous to their undertakers. Professor Tyerman, while not at all ignoring the dimension of religious ideas, instead tends to focus more on the institutional dimensions of the Crusades and how these series of wars were motivated by and affected the non-religious civic and social spheres (Tyerman is also the author of an interesting study in the historiography of the Crusades). No doubt this description misses many important points of union and division.

Here is a new book on the Crusades by Professor Tyerman, The World of the Crusades (Yale University Press).

“Throughout the Middle Ages crusading was justified by religious ideology, but the resulting military campaigns were fueled by concrete objectives: land, resources, power, reputation. Crusaders amassed possessions of all sorts, from castles to reliquaries. Campaigns required material funds and equipment, while conquests produced bureaucracies, taxation, economic exploitation, and commercial regulation. Wealth sustained the Crusades while material objects, from weaponry and military technology to carpentry and shipping, conditioned them.
 
This lavishly illustrated volume considers the material trappings of crusading wars and the objects that memorialized them, in architecture, sculpture, jewelry, painting, and manuscripts. Christopher Tyerman’s incorporation of the physical and visual remains of crusading enriches our understanding of how the crusaders themselves articulated their mission, how they viewed their place in the world, and how they related to the cultures they derived from and preyed upon.”

In the oral argument on the Bladensburg Cross case last week, Justice Kavanaugh suggested a resolution to the controversy based on notions of federalism–that local municipalities or states could and should make decisions about issues like state-sponsored religious symbols on their own, without a uniform, general rule imposed by the Supreme Court. Certainly this was the approach to many controversies that currently go under the Establishment Clause banner before 1947. And, indeed, those who oppose such resolutions often argue that they have the effect of locking in place the status quo and are unfair and oppressive to minorities. That is, they have a conservative orientation–in the etymological sense at least. But recent events have shown that federalist politics may be progressive, too. They may be used to resist national policies that are more conservative than particular local or state governments might like, as much of the blue-state resistance to some of President Trump’s policies suggests. So there is reason to wonder whether federalism has any necessary political valence, or whether instead its valences depend upon the regnant national politics.

At any rate, this new book, Conservative Innovators: How States are Challenging Federal Power (University of Chicago Press), by Ben Merriman, adopts a historical view of these matters and recounts periods in which federalism was used by states to pursue policies that were more conservative than those desired at the national level (or, at least, at the presidential level).

“As American politics has become increasingly polarized, gridlock at the federal level has led to a greater reliance on state governments to get things done. But this arrangement depends a great deal on state cooperation, and not all state officials have chosen to cooperate. Some have opted for conflict with the federal government.

Conservative Innovators traces the activity of far-right conservatives in Kansas who have in the past decade used the powers of state-level offices to fight federal regulation on a range of topics from gun control to voting processes to Medicaid. Telling their story, Ben Merriman then expands the scope of the book to look at the tactics used by conservative state governments across the country to resist federal regulations, including coordinated lawsuits by state attorneys general, refusals to accept federal funds and spending mandates, and the creation of programs designed to restrict voting rights. Through this combination of state-initiated lawsuits and new administrative practices, these state officials weakened or halted major parts of the Obama Administration’s healthcare, environmental protection, and immigration agendas and eroded federal voting rights protections. Conservative Innovators argues that American federalism is entering a new, conflict-ridden era that will make state governments more important in American life than they have been at any time in the past century.”

Here’s an interesting new book that attempts to trace the transition from sacred to secular conceptions of law: Law, Love, and Freedom: From the Sacred to the Secular (Cambridge University Press), by Joshua Neoh.

“How does one lead a life of law, love, and freedom? This inquiry has very deep roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Indeed, the divergent answers to this inquiry mark the transition from Judeo to Christian. This book returns to those roots to trace the twists and turns that these ideas have taken as they move from the sacred to the secular. It relates our most important mode of social organization, law, to two of our most cherished values, love and freedom. In this book, Joshua Neoh sketches the moral vision that underlies our modern legal order and traces our secular legal ideas (constitutionalism versus anarchism) to their theological origins (monasticism versus antinomianism). Law, Love, and Freedom brings together a diverse cast of characters, including Paul and Luther, Augustine and Aquinas, monks and Gnostics, and constitutionalists and anarchists. This book is valuable to any lawyers, philosophers, theologians and historians, who are interested in law as a humanistic discipline.”

Now here is one that looks really interesting. The common law is, of course, the system of judge-made (or, better, judge-found) law in which the law develops gradually, over time, and from the ground-up. That is, from its interaction with real cases over time. But that legal system can also have other non-strictly-legal effects. It can serve as a cohesive force if it is adopted by a series of individual state entities and develops over time among those entities. With enough time, it can even replace other systems of cultural and social cohesion and control. Including religion.

These dynamics of the common law in the American colonies are explored in this new book: E Pluribus Unum: How the Common Law Helped Unify and Liberate Colonial America, 1607-1776 (Oxford University Press), by William E. Nelson.

“The colonies that comprised pre-revolutionary America had thirteen legal systems and governments. Given their diversity, how did they evolve into a single nation? In E Pluribus Unum, the eminent legal historian William E. Nelson explains how this diverse array of legal orders gradually converged over time, laying the groundwork for the founding of the United States. 

From their inception, the colonies exercised a range of approaches to the law. For instance, while New England based its legal system around the word of God, Maryland followed the common law tradition, and New York adhered to Dutch law. Over time, though, the British crown standardized legal procedure in an effort to more uniformly and efficiently exert control over the Empire. But, while the common law emerged as the dominant system across the colonies, its effects were far from what English rulers had envisioned.

E Pluribus Unum highlights the political context in which the common law developed and how it influenced the United States Constitution. In practice, the triumph of the common law over competing approaches gave lawyers more authority than governing officials. By the end of the eighteenth century, many colonial legal professionals began to espouse constitutional ideology that would mature into the doctrine of judicial review. In turn, laypeople came to accept constitutional doctrine by the time of independence in 1776.

Ultimately, Nelson shows that the colonies’ gradual embrace of the common law was instrumental to the establishment of the United States. Not simply a masterful legal history of colonial America, Nelson’s magnum opus fundamentally reshapes our understanding of the sources of both the American Revolution and the Founding.”