Review of The Later Middle Ages: A History of Western Europe, 1254–1494 (1917)
Robert Balmain Mowat (writer).
Read in 2025.
This book is what it says on the tin, with exactly the crappy historiography I expected. Balmain thinks the end of the Knights Templar was “tragic” and describes how the Teutonic Knights fought with “all the bravery of their race”. His Christian boys’-club biases are so strong that his explanations barely cohere, but he’s not a fool. It’s to his credit that he does not divide history into overly neat sections, an attitude exemplified by a section on the Renaissance as perennial through the period and on alchemy as continuous with chemistry. I don’t recommend this book for a modern reader interested in an accurate narrative history of the period, but I do recommend it as an example of how popular histories were written at the time. It remains useful if you want to understand where the grotesquely martial and colourful worldview of Warhammer and other British recreational wargames came from.
References here: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (1978).