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In Sacred Plunder, David Perry argues that plundered relics, and narratives about them, played a central role in shaping the memorial legacy of the Fourth Crusade and the development of Venice's civic identity in the thirteenth century. After the Fourth Crusade ended in 1204, the disputes over the memory and meaning of the conquest began. Many crusaders faced accusations of impiety, sacrilege, violence, and theft. In their own defense, they produced hagiographical narratives about the movement of relics—a medieval genre called translatio—that restated their own versions of events and shaped the memory of the crusade. The recipients of relics commissioned these unique texts in order to exempt both the objects and the people involved with their theft from broader scrutiny or criticism. Perry further demonstrates how these narratives became a focal point for cultural transformation and an argument for the creation of the new Venetian empire as the city moved from an era of mercantile expansion to one of imperial conquest in the thirteenth century.

In Sacred Plunder , David Perry argues that plundered relics, and narratives about them, played a central role in shaping the memorial legacy of the Fourth Crusade and the development of Venice's civic identity in the thirteenth century. After the Fourth Crusade ended in 1204, the disputes over the memory and meaning of the conquest began. Many crusaders faced accusations of impiety, sacrilege, violence, and theft. In their own defense, they produced hagiographical narratives about the movement of relics-a medieval genre called translatio - that restated their own versions of events and shaped the memory of the crusade. The recipients of relics commissioned these unique texts in order to exempt both the objects and the people involved with their theft from broader scrutiny or criticism. Perry further demonstrates how these narratives became a focal point for cultural transformation and an argument for the creation of the new Venetian empire as the city moved from an era of mercantile expansion to one of imperial conquest in the thirteenth century.

The literary world is filled with unemployed and underemployed Ph.D.'s who have found themselves as novelists instead of as professors. Meanwhile, lots of academics have unpublished novels buried in their desk drawers or computers. But it's relatively rare for working professors to publish novels, under their own names, related to their academic expertise. Writing fiction is hard to do well, but it can serve as a powerful way for scholars to share their research and engage with a broader audience.

Men are likely to escape the most overt kinds of sexism experienced by academic mothers, but Perry's experience shows that positioning oneself as a \"working dad\" can be satisfying personally and necessary for attacking the persistent forms of bias in the academy. It can also be helpful professionally.

Academics within the world of higher education are all working at a time when the value of academic knowledge is under attack. The general public perceives faculty members as isolated from reality, holding cushy jobs, and uninterested in open communication. The public has little access to the broad diversity of knowledge, experience, and background inside higher education, because those academics who do achieve broader platforms generally come from only the most elite universities.

Frustrated with the artitificial dynamic of the Internet, Perry has rethought his approach to using the Internet in teaching. He decided to use Facebook to reach his students. He has mostly used Facebook in a liberal-arts-and-sciences seminar on \"Evolution, Eugenics, and Disability.\"

On January 13, 1231, a fire ripped through the treasury of San Marco. It burned for almost a day, feeding on the wood of the inner sanctum. The fire should have reduced everything to ash. But, according to a letter sent by Doge Ranieri Zeno (r. 1253–68) to the pope in 1265, three relics survived: a piece of the True Cross, an ampoule containing the blood of Christ, and the skull of St. John the Baptist, which had been in a wooden box. Considered a miracle, the alleged survival of these relics inspired Zeno to create a new feast

The previous four chapters of this book have examined the translatio narratives of the Fourth Crusade in their immediate contexts and in comparison to one another. But each discrete act of hagiographical memorialization operated within highly localized diachronic cultural systems. Specific cultural norms governed the sites in which hagiographers engaged in contesting the memory of the Fourth Crusade. These localized norms interacted with the pressures from Rome, the stories generated by returning soldiers, and other respondents to the events of 1204. Pull on any narrative thread from any one of the sites that produced translatio texts and you will find