A. Isn’t “revisionism” a prejudcial term, the dissenter’s name for correction? Serious question.
Yeah Wood is RC to the max. It’ll be a while before thois kind of stuff gets much respect in the larger community, though that’s beginning with the Spanish Inquisition.
I would not BUY Wood. Borrow, skim, check the notes and the bibliography, is my advice.
In haste.
Serious answer: Only if one is a revisionist. :D
I can in no wise believe that a document written a thousand years after the fact can bear a better witness than those written by persons on the actual ground, or those in close proximity thereto.
We see this sort of "correction" happening even now, right before our eyes, with regard to Hitler's Germany. Already the numbers are being softened, atrocities are being denied... By my grandson's generation it will be but a dim memory, and the revisionists will have their way with it... all the sheep in the world will be yearning to return to the calm pastures of Germany's glorious past... and that with multiple sources of media, and a strong and vocal nation of survivors and their sons and daughters. They will not forget. But the rest of the world will. All that in four generations (if not sooner).
Look at what the history books have done to the majestic rise and purpose of the United States! Have you read a current history book? It's appalling!
How much easier to cherry-pick desired results from a thousand years away, and especially so when the lion's share of the record is in the hands of the victor, the author has a predisposed bias, and the victims being all but annihilated a millenia ago, their books and records burned, their progeny nothing but the barest threads?
No. I will take the first witnesses at their word.