Sarah Davis-Secord

In Where Three Worlds Met, Sarah Davis-Secord pushes back against some of the prevailing views of medieval Sicilian history, particularly those which favour geographic determinism. The island was not simply and continually "the crossroads of the Mediterranean", but rather that its significance was always shaped by being on the peripheries of empires. Peripheral, Davis-Secord points out, isn't a synonym for unimportant. While the monograph is aimed at those who are already familiar with Sicilian history, Davis-Secord's prose is crisp enough to be accessed by medievalists more generally. Grad students will read it profitably for her approach to the limited and challenging textual source base.… (meer)