My research focuses on the impact of the crusading movement on culture, identity and memory in Europe and the Mediterranean. My first book, The Rise of a Crusading Culture, will make use of a number of case studies to explore the processes that infused crusading ideals into aristocratic culture in twelfth-century Europe.
I am also involved in two further ventures. First, I am a supervising scholar, alongside Professor Nicholas L. Paul (Fordham University), on the Independent Crusaders Project. This teaching and research tool, which although available online is still in development, focuses attention on the understudied subject of armed pilgrimage in the eastern Mediterranean in the years between the ‘numbered’ crusades. I am also in the early stages of a research project on the seventeenth-century reception of Thomas Fuller’s Historie of the Holy Warre (first published 1639). This is the first stage of a wider examination of memories of crusading and crusaders in the period 1600–1800.