De Re Militari | Book Reviews
Kelly DeVries
A Cumulative Bibliography of Medieval Military History and Technology, Update 2004
Brill, 2007. History of Warfare on CD-Rom: The new materials included appeared in print as volume 26 in the series History of Warfare - ISBN 90 04 14040 9.
Kelly DeVries’ A Cumulative Bibliography of Medieval Military History and Technology, Update 2004 is a challenging work. The goal of this book was to provide references to all medieval military and technologically related works either missed by the previous volume that covered references up to the end of 1999 and to add all new works in these fields published from 2000 to 2002. The challenges of this book for the writer include the immense amount of detailed research needed to exhaustively list all works published in these fields and how to organize the data. By the same token, the reviewer is challenged to judge the author’s success in research and organization rather than examine a particular thesis or interpretation of evidence.
The book is organized into over 250 categories that provide references to all works covering topics from Late Antiquity to 1648 in Europe and the Middle East plus references from other areas that specifically relate to these regions. These categories are fairly specific, such as Medieval – England – Angevin Kings or Early Modern – Military Thought. As mentioned, the Update 2004 follows a similar 2001 cumulative bibliography and attempts to fill in the holes and add new material, and these categories match those of the previous work so that all books in this sequence can be used more efficiently.
The organization is fairly effective, though three basic issues are inherent in this type of work. First, since DeVries is writing more from a generalist’s point-of-view, the categories will not necessarily match with what a specialist might feel is more appropriate. For example, an Anglo-Saxon scholar might feel that having only two categories for Anglo-Saxon military history (Medieval – England – Anglo-Saxon England and Medieval – England – Anglo-Saxon – 1066) is insufficient to fully organize appropriate Anglo-Saxon references. The second issue follows from the first: each person will have personal issues with some of the organization given their own individual preferences. Finally, because each person has specific ideas of where to look for a particular type of source, he or she might miss a resource that is listed in a related area that might not seem to be pertinent. This could be solved by adding to each reference category a list of other related categories, but there are no cross references. Hence, each user of this work will find issues with the organization, though this is not a criticism of DeVries but instead of the medium.
The only way that a reviewer can truly judge the quality of the research is to completely re-invent the wheel and go through every method of searching references to duplicate DeVries’ work. This seems somewhat impractical, given that DeVries has spent years doing this research, so the solution, at least in this review, was to effectively take core samples. These core samples are an examination of a few categories that the reviewer is comfortable with and a comparison of his results with those of DeVries. In those categories, namely those on pre-Conquest England, no works directly covering Anglo-Saxon military history were noted as excluded by this reviewer. Some works perhaps could have been included, such as Ken Dark’s Britain and the End of the Roman Empire or Sam Lucy’s Anglo-Saxon Way of Death, but, while valuable to the Anglo-Saxon military historian, these are indeed somewhat tangential. Such tangential works are important, but would have undoubtedly expanded the book to unwieldy proportions. Undoubtedly some references are not listed in this book that should have been, but it seems impossible for any researcher to get every possible reference, implying that each successive book in the series will provide new listings for earlier periods, as this work does for references prior to 1999.
Most of the criticisms of this work, as well as most of the issues that limit the value of this work, have very little to do with the work of Kelly DeVries. This is the kind of work that is admirable, useful, and should be encouraged and appreciated. This is also the kind of work that should be digitized and, in fact, this series is available on CD-ROM with searchable, cross-linked, and consistently updated references. These criticisms notwithstanding, this is a terrific resource and scholars of military history should ensure that they have access to it either in paper or electronic format by owning it themselves or urging their libraries to purchase it.