Explore the vast range of titles available.

When the First Crusade ended with the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, jubilant crusaders returned home to Europe bringing with them stories, sacred relics, and other memorabilia, including banners, jewelry, and weapons. In the ensuing decades, the memory of the crusaders' bravery and pious sacrifice was invoked widely among the noble families of western Christendom. Popes preaching future crusades would count on these very same families for financing, leadership, and for the willing warriors who would lay down their lives on the battlefield. Despite the great risks and financial hardships associated with crusading, descendants of those who suffered and died on crusade would continue to take the cross, in some cases over several generations. Indeed, as Nicholas L. Paul reveals inTo Follow in Their Footsteps, crusading was very much a family affair. Scholars of the crusades have long pointed to the importance of dynastic tradition and ties of kinship in the crusading movement but have failed to address more fundamental questions about the operation of these social processes. What is a \"family tradition\"? How are such traditions constructed and maintained, and by whom? How did crusading families confront the loss of their kin in distant lands? Making creative use of Latin dynastic narratives as well as vernacular literature, personal possessions and art objects, and architecture from across western Europe, Paul shows how traditions of crusading were established and reinforced in the collective memories of noble families throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Even rulers who never fulfilled crusading vows found their political lives dominated and, in some ways, directed by the memory of their crusading ancestors. Filled with unique insights and careful analysis,To Follow in Their Footstepsreveals the lasting impact of the crusades, beyond the expeditions themselves, on the formation of dynastic identity and the culture of the medieval European nobility.

This historical survey of medieval European Christianity from the eighth through the fifteenth century gives particular attention to the multiple religious movements and their forms of spirituality which produced not one but three distinct syntheses of medieval religion, society, and culture. These syntheses were each in turn attempts at building a shared community of faith often called Christendom, which however proved elusively temporal in nature and thus repeatedly in need of reform and renewal as the historical context for Christendom changed over time.

The present study is part of a larger project to chart the socio-cultural dynamics of the South Western Asian region (1918–2007). It is organized around three basic tenets: (1) that the South West Asian region has been (and still is) in longenduring cultural confrontation with the West; (2) that the confrontation with the West is not to reject the ‘modernity’ of the West, but to suggest an alternative to it; and (3) the confrontation with the West, in the contemporary context, is a function of Western imperialist penetration of the region, and its hegemonic practices. The focus of the study will be on the ‘resurgence’ of movements of political Islam, of which Western social science has, so far, failed to understand its causes. The proposition is to analyse the movements of political Islam as New Social Movements in the process of transition into mainstream political parties, dominating the political life of the whole region. It will further be contended that the disillusionment with the West in the region undermines liberal nationalist movements and feeds into the radicalization of social forces, as resistance movements.