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This thesis addresses academic writing using two practice-led disciplines, academic literacies and ethnomethodology. It is first concerned to evaluate the possibilities of cooperation between these cognate endeavours, and concludes that where academic literacies provides a locus and set of topics for academic writing studies, ethnomethodology can contribute a sharpening of focus and of analytic tools. Ethnomethodology provides a reassuring message in that it confirms the value of detailed local studies, in this case of literacy. However, it is also the source of critique for those literacy scholars who have tried to site their studies in dualisms. This is seen as a rejection of situated studies. There is therefore a prominent methodological focus in this thesis. These methodological issues are then discussed in regard to how they translate into agendas and technologies for the study of social literacies. It is shown that ethnographic-type methods are necessary for such studies, even where they do not qualify as ‘full’ ethnographies by traditional standards. This study itself took on a quasi-ethnographic or ethnographic-type approach, using a longitudinal method to track the academic writing practices of eight undergraduate students with the aim of ascertaining the social and collaborative ways in which their work is accorded plausibility. Material from the study is presented in the form of interview analysis, and in a series of ethnographic case studies that use a variety of material, including interviews with students and staff, student essays, and various other materials that were accrued throughout the administrative life of the essays. Various methods for achieving or according plausibility, on the part of both students and staff, are discussed and analysed. Although all protagonists involved in essay writing and marking looked for and dealt in conventions wherever possible, the material presented here demonstrates that participants were generally aware of the limits to the possibilities of phenomena, and that there may be cause to locate, challenge, change, and adapt to the things that can acceptably be said and done in essay writing.

This thesis uses the record of benefaction in Europe to the Military Orders of the Hospital and the Temple to measure regional crusading support and to provide a description of the contribution of countries outside the crusading heartland, in particular the Empire, Poland, the Czech lands and Hungary, to Europe's crusading enterprise between 1145 and 1291. Through critical interpretation of published sources and secondary literature, making use of more than 400 original documents, among them several from the Hospitallers' Prague archive which remain unpublished, it examines in detail, for the first time as a whole, the endowment of both orders and the establishment of their houses on the territory of the Piast rulers of Poland and in the two Slav principalities of Pomerania. At the same time it assesses the development of the Military Orders' estates in terms of the relative importance of initial endowment, subsequent acquisition, plantation of new properties and alteration in the terms of ownership; in so doing, it aims to contribute to the correction of a long-standing but erroneous model for the economic development of 13th and 14th century Poland. Through an examination of local conditions it postulates a model for the creation of Hospitaller and Templar houses and the evolution of provincial hierarchies. It examines available information for the internal administration of both orders, the activity of their officials, and the number, nationality and regional connections of their membership. It provides new information on the evolution of independent prioral offices in the Hospital's two provinces of Bohemia and of Eastern Germany from 1291. The local involvement of both orders is set in context and closely defined for the regions under consideration. The penetration of Eastern European society by crusading ideology is examined as a necessary background to reassessment of the early activity of 'national' military orders and the Teutonic Knights in the Baltic theatre.