Items related to The Holy Lance
The year is 1191. A daring counterattack against the Saracens’ last-ditch effort to relieve the besieged city of Acre has not only saved the Third Crusade from a fatal defeat; it has also brought the leader of that counterattack, English Templar Michael Fitz Alan, to the attention of King Richard the Lionheart. In the days that follow, the king charges Fitz Alan with a life-or-death mission – to recover the long-lost Holy Lance, a religious relic widely believed to be responsible for the near-miraculous success of the First Crusade. The ensuing quest leads Fitz Alan and a hand-picked band of Templars on a journey deep into enemy territory, where they battle Saracens, Assassins, hostile Christians and even a traitor within their own ranks as they seek to return the Holy Lance to Christian hands and thereby ensure the liberation of Jerusalem and the success of the crusade.
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From the Author:
The Holy Lance, the first installment in The English Templars series, is a work of military historical adventure, and as such it conforms closely to the conventions that define that sub-genre. It is distinctive, however, in several ways. First, while most historical novels dealing with the Templar Knights (or, for that matter, other military orders like the Hospitallers, Teutonic Knights, etc.) tend to caricature the members of the order (either positively or negatively), in The English Templars, Latham tries to capture and convey the complex emotional and psychological realities of these self-styled "knights of Christ" who, after all, were simultaneously both brutal killers and pious monks. The English Templars does this by chronicling and illuminating the transformation - through a series of trials - of one vicious-if-repentant "worldly knight" into a vicious-but-reformed "New Knight" (the former being a brutal killer serving his own selfish ends; the latter being a brutal killer serving a higher good and in the process seeking his own redemption). Secondly, while focused on the protagonist and his companions, The English Templars does attempt to weave together both the "kings'-eye" and the "grunts'-eye" view of the Third Crusade (think Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe series meets Sharon Kay Penman's Lionheart). The existing literature within the genre does not do this, typically adopting one perspective to the exclusion of the other. Latham believes, however, that the story of this crusade is best told from both these viewpoints - for the characters involved, and the plot in which they are caught up, are simply too delicious not to exploit as fully as possible. Beyond that, the movement between "kings'-eye" and "grunts'-eye" perspectives allows a picture to emerge of the contrasting fates of the ultimate "worldly knight" (Richard the Lionheart) and the ultimate "New Knight" (Fitz Alan). Finally, The English Templars is distinctive in that it is strictly faithful to the actual history of the Templar Order. In recent years it has become fashionable to portray the Templar knights as keepers of either some sort of terrible secret or a powerful relic - and often there is a good dose of heresy or precocious secularism thrown in for good measure. In The English Templars, however, these embellishments are eschewed in favor of a more realistic portrayal of the actual purposes, rituals, practices and beliefs that shaped the individual and collective lives of these warrior-monks.
From the Inside Flap:
Knox Robinson author Andrew A. Latham is an award-winning professor of International Relations who regularly teaches courses in medieval political thought, international relations, and war. Trained as a Political Scientist, Latham has spent the last decade-and-a-half researching political violence in the Middle Ages. He has written scholarly articles on medieval war, the crusades, jihad, and the political thought of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas. His most recent book is a work of non-fiction entitled Theorizing Medieval Geopolitics: War and World Order in the Age of the Crusades. Latham was born in England, raised in Canada and currently lives in the United States. He graduated from York University in Toronto with a BA (Honours) in Political Science; later he earned an MA from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario; and later yet, he earned a PhD from his alma mater, York. Latham is a member of the Historical Novel Society, the Historical Writers' Association and De Re Militari: The Society For Medieval Military History.Since 1997 Latham has been a member of the Political Science Department at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he where he lives with his wife Wendy, daughter Bernadette and son Michael.
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- PublisherKnox Robinson Publishing
- Publication date2015
- ISBN 10 1910282529
- ISBN 13 9781910282526
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages220
- Rating
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