ABSTRACT
This witty jeu d’esprit demonstrates how even the less than promising genre of Gibbonian historiography is grist to Deacon’s parodic mill. The ‘Digression on the Family of Warren’ is a burlesque of sections of Charles Mills’ two volume The History of the Crusades, for the Recovery and Possession of the Holy Land (1820). Mills (1788–1826) abandoned a career as a solicitor and spent the last decade of his life as a medieval historian, publishing An History of Muhammedanism (1817), the History of the Crusades, The Travels of Theodore Ducas (1822) 1 and The History of Chivalry\ or Knighthood and its Times (1825). Scott praised both The History of the Crusades and The History of Chivalry and drew upon Mills’ work in the composition of The Talisman (1825) and Count Robert of Paris (1831). The DNB rightly comments that ‘Mills was a man of learning, but as an historian was a very humble follower of Gibbon’. In the manner of Gibbon and Hume, Mills is less than enthusiastic about the Crusaders’ motivations and behaviour and Deacon captures his enlightenment scepticism well.
