Over the course of half a millennium and across a large area of western Eurasia and parts of northern Africa, the crusades affected every rank and order of human society, from modest farmers and pastoralists to the mightiest rulers. In Latin Christian Europe, where crusading expeditions and ideology originated, few individuals were not implicated in requests to aid them, whether that aid was military, logistical, financial or supplicatory. In the lands and communities targeted by crusading armies, violence was visited upon the city and the countryside, elites and common folk alike. Whether crusading is seen as a movement, practice, process or sequence of distinct military campaigns, however, no group was as deeply implicated in its continued prosecution as the European aristocracy.

As it re-evaluates the foundational role of translation in shaping modern Arabic literature, this chapter challenges reductive narratives that portray translation as a mere one-way importation of European forms, instead revealing a rich legacy of literary exchange where Arabic literature has both absorbed and influenced global traditions. Through case studies spanning from the Nahda to post-9/11 publishing trends and prize circuits, the chapter demonstrates how translation mediates aesthetics, ethics, and cultural capital. It further analyzes the politics of domestication and foreignization in English translations of Arabic texts at several points in recent history. The chapter posits that Arabic literature has always been world literature, not solely through its export into English, but through its deep embeddedness in transhistorical and translingual circuits of exchange. Ultimately, translation is presented not as a secondary act, but as a constitutive force in Arabic literary modernity and its global reception.

Academic achievement is critical for lifelong health and wealth, but Latinx students have lower rates of high school completion and matriculation into higher education. This chapter describes research on the educational experiences of Latinx students using data collected over the past 12 years with thousands of families to argue that the achievement gap is maintained by the myth of meritocracy and the (mis)allocation of resources. The findings compel the authors to understand the “underachievement” of Latinx students as a reflection of an inequitable education system. Thus, they call on educators and policy makers to invest in programs and policies that cultivate linguistic, familial, navigational, and resistant capital for the sake of education justice for Latinx (and other marginalized) students. By building capital within communities, Latinx families and their allies can transform the US education system to meet the needs and affirm the belonging of Latinx students.

This chapter explores the understudied role of music in Dutch private social life during the long nineteenth century. Examining a wide variety of cases and sources, it reveals that many of the country’s diversified early modern private musical practices persisted until the outbreak of the First World War. The chapter shows how music functioned as social and cultural capital in the way it shaped the agendas and identities of both hosts and guests. By tracing contemporaries’ expectations and experiences related to the social functions of music, the study highlights how they internalized intersecting societal ideas with regards to social groups. It shows that the Dutch were divided into various emotional-musical communities that shared emotional as well as musical norms, preferences, and behaviors. Uncovering processes of social exclusion as a key characteristic of Dutch private music sociability, the chapter concludes that “salons” were not as harmless as often assumed.

This chapter discusses selected texts from contemporary Native American/First Nations, Black, Latinx, Asian American, Jewish American, and Arab American literature to show how they diversify hegemonic representations of financial capital and money as a medium. As they address issues such as settler colonialism, the afterlife of slavery, the concept of “alien capital,” deceptive promises of wealth, the social meanings of money, and the value of their groups’ respective cultural capital, they feature a range of stylistic innovations that illuminate the entanglements of literary and financial discourses in the past as well as the present.

This chapter examines e-book realness in terms of identity and love: e-books shared or not shared, displayed or not displayed, and made a cherished part of the reader’s personal history or barred from such status. It examines aspects of display and cultural capital in forms specific to digital and forms specific to print. It investigates how stereotypes (of some readers as unqualified and some reading practices as inferior) and assumptions (including tropes of furtive reading) interact with existing narratives of literary decline, technology as a threat to culture, and women as incompetent readers. It explores love for reading devices as well as love for print, and how identity as a bibliophile proves compatible with e-reading. E-books are only sometimes real, but it is their very flexibility that makes them so valuable to book lovers. They can be public or private, permanent or ephemeral, valuable or valueless, intimate or distant, depending on one’s usage and settings but also on one’s idea of what an e-book is; and, as demonstrated, that idea is highly adaptable and at least sometimes under one’s conscious control.

The chapter articulates the transition from consistent brand image projection to engaging consumer landmarks through advocacy and identity affiliation, spotlighting the integral role of brand equity. In exploring the different interpretations of brand symbols across varied consumer groups, it acknowledges the challenges brands face in maintaining relevance and authenticity in an increasingly complex digital landscape. This underscores the necessity for brands to evolve as landmarks within the cultural landscape, guiding consumer engagement and fostering community and belonging, while avoiding the pitfalls of perceived intrusiveness.

This chapter focusses on the role of brands in shaping cultural intelligibility and consumer identity. It illustrates how brands, beyond their commercial role, embody cultural categories and stabilise societal norms. Brands are seen as multifaceted entities, serving as signs and symbols within a media-rich consumer environment. In exploring the company, consumer, and societal perspectives, this chapter presents an integrated approach to understanding the intricate relationship between brands and their audiences. This approach considers the complex milieu in which brands operate and the subjective realities constructed through social interactions in the habitus in branding, reflecting on how brands and consumers develop dispositions influencing social expectations. The dynamics of capital are highlighted in the exchange of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital, wherein power, often veiled in accepted cultural perceptions, is dissected as a subtle force that both brands and consumers wield.

This chapter uses book history and digital humanities approaches to situate e-books’ liminal ‘book but not real book’ status in historic and contemporary contexts. The question of whether digital books deserve full status as ‘books’ – and equality with print – has dogged e-books since their inception. Readers are now negotiating e-book realness on their own terms. Addressing definitions of bookness and long-standing debates on digital materiality, the chapter progresses through aspects of legitimacy to analysis of qualitative data on whether, and why, readers consider e-books real. The complexity of readers’ conceptions of the realness of e-books demonstrates how strands of the metaphor of the book, the bookness of physical books, the realness of electronic texts, and the particularities of paratext and literary status for digital works interweave, setting the stage for subsequent chapters following the reader through stages of discovering, obtaining, reading, retaining, displaying, and (sometimes) loving a digital book.

First-generation immigrants and refugees (newcomers hereafter) enroll in college at high rates often motivated by high aspirations and optimistic views about the potential for education to stimulate social mobility in the United States. In their pursuits, however, newcomers face many obstacles to completing their degree. This chapter draws on Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital to explore the postsecondary aspirations and experiences of eighteen current and recently graduated newcomer college students. Through in-depth interviews, participants documented the challenges they faced during their transition to college. This chapter draws attention to the social and structural challenges facing newcomers as they transition to college as well as the resources on which they may draw in their educational pursuits. For instance, while participants demonstrated fortitude and determination to succeed in college, many also expressed concerns that they would not be able to fulfill their career goals and high aspirations. The findings offered in this chapter have practical implications for educators and policymakers seeking to improve the completion rates of newcomer college students.

Building relationships and utilizing support networks on and off campus as a first-generation college student (FGCS) from an immigrant family is critical to achieving postsecondary success. This chapter explores the personal support networks and help-seeking preferences of immigrant-origin FGCSs as part of a three-year longitudinal mixed-methods study with FGCSs at four public Hispanic-serving institutions in California. We employ social network analysis methods using survey and interview data to explore the types of relationships twelve Latinx immigrant-origin FGCSs have that provide them support in college. To guide our analysis, we use Yosso’s (2005) model of community cultural wealth. Findings reveal the significance and specific types of support provided by parents, siblings, extended family, friends and peers, co-workers, and college advisors. These findings promote an expansive view of familial support, with many connections providing encouragement, motivation, and tangible support and serving as brokers to college-based resources. Recognizing these relationships can facilitate the modification of student services and programming to help FGCSs enroll and persist in college.

This chapter examines the poems of Juvencus, Prudentius, and Ausonius, not primarily as specimens of a late-antique aesthetics, but as instruments for the propagation of religious knowledge and the consolidation of Christian hegemony through the appropriation of pagan tools of art. The poems will be considered both as vehicles of acculturation and as objects of culture in their own right, expressing and fostering a new sense of moral and political ascendancy. It will be argued that where Juvencus appropriates the hexameter form and tropes and images from classical epic, Prudentius seems to invent new forms with the purpose of superseding classical culture and adapting its imagery to a Christian world-view. In Ausonius, Christian imagery is subliminal, betokening his own certitude that the victory of the church is unassailable; it will be argued that in his crucifixion of Cupid, subliminal use of Christian images hastens the dissolution of the pagan sensibility from within.

In January 1917, the Red Cross Shakespeare Exhibition, which opened at the Grafton Galleries in London, was advertised with two different posters. One displayed an oversize red cross on a white background – the Red Cross emblem and the English national flag. The other depicted Shakespeare’s coat of arms. The exhibition, described in the press as the most comprehensive show of Shakespeareana ever exhibited, was originally curated in Manchester as part of the celebrations of the 1916 Tercentenary, the commemoration of the three hundred-year anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. In London, it became part of the war effort, the way civilians at the ‘Home Front’ did their bit to help the British Army in the trenches. The exhibition, a successful charity venture, moved to London thanks to the collaboration of actor-manager Martin Harvey and the British Red Cross, one of several wartime collaborations between the British NPO and the theatrical profession to bring relief to Western Front soldiers. The poster portraying Shakespeare’s coat of arms aimed to present Shakespeare as an English gentleman, to counteract the influence of the Baconians who questioned Shakespeare’s authorship. This exhibition was one of several ways in which Shakespeare’s cultural capital was enlisted to raise funds in wartime.

This chapter explores the magazine culture of late colonial and early national America in order to recover the crucial role played by the short story in the periodical’s overburdened ambition to bring “cultural capital” across the Atlantic. Looking at these magazines we find the short story in unlikely places and forms – embedded within other fictions or non-fiction narratives, serialized in relationship to prized illustrations, or disguised as the “serial essay.” But while the print economy of the magazine would change dramatically by the 1840s and 1850s, resulting in the rise of the more familiar and recognizable periodical short story, the magazine short story has been there virtually from the beginning.