ABSTRACT
The crusades and ideas of crusading have long held a place in the collective imaginations. The crusades – as illustrated by the breadth of examples above – have remained a potent concept, although their meaning has been contested. Crusade historiography constitutes an existing field of study in itself, but one which cannot be divorced from broader assessments of how crusading has been variously understood. Crusading has been used at popular, mass-culture levels, as well as in carefully framed ideological moments. The studies included, therefore, will address a wide range of events, groups, individuals and contexts, whilst discovering and evaluating perceptions and uses of the crusades. Crusading pasts, real or imagined, continued to occupy central places in European national self-imaginings in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The longevity and diversity of crusading – while maintained at different levels of intensity between the West and the Near East – kept the idea, or the memory of the idea, 'in play'.
