Customer Reviews

Medieval Sieges & Siegecraft

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This book by Geoffrey Hindley, who has written several other titles on medieval warfare, is written mainly for a non-academic audience. The stories of sieges that he relates are interesting, but his book tends to lack the analysis necessary for research. For a general audience, the book is informative and more importantly accurate; however, no footnotes or end notes and a limited bibliography make using it for a research project difficult, which was what I was trying to do. On the plus side, the chapters are short and organized into simple cohesive units like "Artillery" or "Logistics." The scope of the book is limited to siege warfare in the latter part of the Middle Ages, probably due to the lack of written information that survives from the early medieval period. Overall, this is a good book for those who are interested in the subject of medieval warfare, but those that are trying to research the subject academically should probably look elsewhere. I have found other books on the topic that are much easier to use for a research project on the interaction of human nature and siege warfare because Medieval Sieges and Siegecraft provides information, but getting to the source of that information is not very easy.