Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem

By Carol Delaney

Five hundred years after he set sail, Christopher Columbus is universally renowned as the man who discovered the New World, and is also widely held responsible for what went wrong there in the years that followed. This book, by acclaimed scholar Carol Delaney, will change that understanding of the man and his mission. Carol Delaney describes how Columbus's true motive for finding a western route to the Orient was not simply the quest for glory and riches, but to fund a new crusade - a goal that motivated him until the day he died. Rather than an avaricious glory hunter, Carol Delaney reveals him as a man of extraordinary determination, passion and conviction. Even in the face of ridicule, Columbus believed that he was destined to play a decisive role in retaking Jerusalem, which he and his contemporaries believed was the key to the future of the Christian world. Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem also entails the remarkable and chaotic events that struck Europe in the years preceding Columbus's birth and brings the challenges of ocean navigation dramatically to life. By putting Christopher Columbus fully in the context of his times, Carol Delaney has created a thought provoking and timely reappraisal of a misunderstood man and his legacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Duckworth Overlook
• Release date: Jul 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9780715644782

Carol Delaney

Carol Delaney received an MTS from Harvard Divinity School and a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago and is a graduate of Boston University. She was the assistant director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard, and a visiting professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Brown University. She is now a professor emerita at Stanford University and a research scholar at Brown University.  Delaney is the author of several books, including The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology in Turkish Village Society, Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of Biblical Myth, Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Criticism, and Investigating Culture: An Experiential Introduction to Anthropology.