You know what sucks?

It sucks when you are working on revising your book manuscript and the reviewer has asked that you beef up your discussion of a particular historical event which is, at best, ancillary to your topic of discussion … and then, when you go to do a little further reading on said historical event you discover that there is a HUGE DEBATE amongst historians about whether it ever even happened.

Not just any little ol’ historical event — one of those basic, formative, everyone’s-heard-of-it historical events. It’s like discovering that historians have decided that the Crusades might have been a story constructed by a few guys with a printing press. So everything you thought you knew about the Crusades — and your rather general references to this “historical fact” in your ms., because why do you need to say anything more about such a well-known “historical fact” anyway? — suddenly have to be reformed with reference to the possibility that some annoying historians have argued it away altogether.

Thanks a lot historians! You make it very difficult for us modern literary critics to make the cursory gestures towards “historical context” that allow us to claim to be responsible, historically grounded scholars while actually not giving a damn about you and your little disagreements about “what really happened.”

I want my Crusades back.