Говорят, термин «дедовщина» появился в те далёкие времена, когда будущих рыцарей их старшие товарищи подвергали всевозможным испытаниям – дабы подготовить к тяготам будущей походной жизни. «Учебные странствия юной Европы на Восток» унесли жизни десятков тысяч паломников в латах. Удалось ли им, как и было обещано, быстрее попасть в рай – история умалчивает. Но, так или иначе, они сложили свои головы в том самом месте, где Земля встречается с Небом, – а значит, именно сюда и лежит наш путь, который с лёгкой руки историков мы привычно зовём Крестовыми походами… Как получилось, что, отправляясь карать неверных, доблестные рыцари потопили в крови самый христианский из всех городов? Как колдунья Мелузина помогла султану одолеть непобедимую рыцарскую армию? Почему море так и не расступилось перед участниками детского похода? Куда исчез из покорённого крестоносцами Монсегюра Священный Грааль? И почему учёные до сих пор спорят, чем являлись походы западноевропейцев на Восток: воплощением кровавого разгула или высокой духовной миссией? Об этом и многом другом – в книге Екатерины Монусовой «История Крестовых походов».

Anna Coreth's work appeared originally in 1959. Her interpretation focuses on the relationship of Catholic religious practices and symbols to the House of Habsburg from the Counter or Catholic Reformation until the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Coreth demonstrates how elements of religiosity and spirituality, particularly those surrounding the Catholic Eucharistic and Marian celebrations, became part of the Habsburg ruling style. She discusses the imperial house's dedication to these rituals and what the religious practices came to mean to individual members of the Habsburg monarchy, such as Rudolf I, Ferdinand I, II, and III, Maria Theresa, and Joseph II. Coreth demonstrates the Habsburg monarchy's devotion to specific Catholic rituals and how these rituals in turn acquired political significance. Moreover, Coreth also examines the links between this Habsburg religious style, on the one hand, and the institutional Catholic Church, popular piety, religious orders, and mainstream political developments. The book is an extremely rich source for early modern and modern Austrian history.

In 1730 a delegation of Illinois Indians arrived in the French colonial capital of New Orleans. An Illinois leader presented two ceremonial pipes, or calumets, to the governor. One calumet represented the diplomatic alliance between the two men and the other symbolized their shared attachment to Catholicism. The priest who documented this exchange also reported with excitement how the Illinois recited prayers and sang hymns in their Native language, a display that astonished the residents of New Orleans. The "Catholic" calumet and the Native-language prayers and hymns were the product of long encounters between the Illinois and Jesuit missionaries, men who were themselves transformed by these sometimes intense spiritual experiences. The conversions of people, communities, and cultural practices that led to this dramatic episode all occurred in a rapidly evolving and always contested colonial context. In The Catholic Calumet, historian Tracy Neal Leavelle examines interactions between Jesuits and Algonquian-speaking peoples of the upper Great Lakes and Illinois country, including the Illinois and Ottawas, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Leavelle abandons singular definitions of conversion that depend on the idealized elevation of colonial subjects from "savages" to "Christians" for more dynamic concepts that explain the changes that all participants experienced. A series of thematic chapters on topics such as myth and historical memory, understandings of human nature, the creation of colonial landscapes, translation of religious texts into Native languages, and the influence of gender and generational differences demonstrates that these encounters resulted in the emergence of complicated and unstable cross-cultural religious practices that opened new spaces for cultural creativity and mutual adaptation.