The conclusion revisits the book’s key claims and maps new avenues for research on medieval European representations of, and self-definition in relation to, Muslims and Islam. It closes with a brief discussion of the qualified anti-crusade argument, grounded in imperfect ideas of equality, voiced by the French lawyer Honorat Bovet in his widely disseminated Arbre des batailles (1387).

The final chapter considers tensions between beliefs in the “healthy,” salvific character of crusading and anxieties about the morality of violence. It argues that, finding their origins in events that took place during the First Crusade, these tensions became especially acute in late medieval crusade culture, crystallizing in works by John Gower, John Wyclif, and Michel Pintoin, among others, and complexly articulated in The Siege of Jerusalem and Richard Coeur de Lion. The chapter reads these romances alongside literary and historical responses to the Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, pogroms against Europe’s Jewish communities, and acts of cannibalism perpetrated by crusaders at the siege of Ma‘arra in 1098. The Siege of Jerusalem, Richard Coeur de Lion, and authors who wrote about these events deployed similar representational strategies to raise questions about the corruptive potential and human costs of holy war.

This book explores the role that values and value judgements play in assessments of capacity. In doing so, it has attempted to grapple with a fundamental tension that lies at the heart of our capacity legislation. On the one hand, the liberal intuitions that underpin the test for capacity suggest that people ought to be free to make decisions according to their own values and beliefs, no matter how unusual or eccentric these may be. On the other, there are certain beliefs or ways of valuing that we intuitively regard as so abnormal, and so harmful, that we think that far from facilitating decisions based on them, people ought instead to be protected from them. We characterise these beliefs, values, or behaviours as ‘disordered’, yet as the foregoing analysis has shown, the line between the disordered and the eccentric is far from clear cut, being both socially and culturally contingent, and reliant on complex clinical judgements, rather than a matter of objective medical fact.

This chapter will explore how the provisions governing best interests assessments ought to be reformed so as to better ensure that an agent’s authentic desires are being prioritised in decisions being taken about them. The starting point should be that the assessor ascertains ‘so far is reasonably practicable’ the individual’s wishes, feelings, beliefs, and values. This should then be supplemented by a presumption that the agent’s wishes and feelings will be determinative of what is in their best interests, except when giving effect to them will expose the person to a risk of significant harm. Even where the harms are significant, however, there will still be occasions where the agent’s wishes and feelings should nonetheless take precedence; where to do otherwise would involve frustrating their deeply and authentically held beliefs, values, or commitments. This chapter will highlight some of the potential considerations which ought to guide assessors in these circumstances. It will propose that assessors be provided with a list of factors that they must take into account when determining the degree of weight to be ascribed to the agent’s wishes, which reflect these considerations.

The language continuum is defined by the dimensions of language ability (from language talent to language disorder) and bilingual language proficiency (from monolingual to multilingual) in this chapter. Although the terms “language ability” and “proficiency” are often used interchangeably in the literature, we systematically differentiate these two dimensions in order to explain variations in speakers from different linguistic backgrounds. Cross-linguistic data are presented to strengthen this argument. The differentiation of these two language dimensions is important for professionals to prevent the over- and underdiagnosis of children who come from language minority groups or exhibit bilingual language disorder. A discussion of similarities in language acquisition between typically developing monolingual and bilingual first language speakers and between monolingual and bilingual children with developmental language disorder is included to highlight common features along the language dimensions. Within-subject approaches and different measures of assessment are described to support the classification of children from diverse linguistic environments.

We have seen rapid development of various brain training methods in the past few decades that quickly became popular among educators, despite the lack of evidence about these products’ effectiveness. Some negative outcomes prompted researchers from both neuroscience and education to develop collaboratively neuroscience-based approaches to educational and clinical practices. This chapter discusses fundamental training-related questions, such as neuroplasticity, transfer, and individual differences and provides a detailed examination of one domain-specific method (i.e., working memory training) and a multi-domain approach (i.e., music training). Based on the findings, we point out how critical it is to determine the specific cognitive or linguistic skills that researchers intend to target with a given training method prior to the beginning of the training process. Further, it is essential to identify the overlapping processing components and underlying neural regions between the training tasks and the post-training measures to achieve transfer to untrained tasks.