War and the Making of Medieval Monastic Culture
War and the Making of Medieval Monastic Culture

Author: Katherine Smith

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Published: 2013-09-19

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1843838672

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"An extremely interesting and important book... makes an important contribution to the history of medieval monastic spirituality in a formative period, whilst also fitting into wider debates on the origins, development and impact of ideas on crusading and holy war." Dr William Purkis, University of Birmingham Monastic culture has generally been seen as set apart from the medieval battlefield, as "those who prayed" were set apart from "those who fought". However, in this first study of the place of war within medieval monastic culture, the author shows the limitations of this division. Through a wide reading of Latin sermons, letters, and hagiography, she identifies a monastic language of war that presented the monk as the archetypal "soldier of Christ" and his life of prayer as a continuous combat with the devil: indeed, monks' claims to supremacy on the spiritual battlefield grew even louder as Church leaders extended the title of "soldier of Christ" to lay knights and crusaders. So, while medieval monasteries have traditionally been portrayed as peaceful sanctuaries in a violent world, here the author demonstrates that monastic identity was negotiated through real and imaginary encounters with war, and that the concept of spiritual warfare informed virtually every aspect of life in the cloister. It thus breaks new ground in the history of European attitudes toward warfare and warriors in the age of the papal reform movement and the early crusades. Katherine Allen Smith is Assistant Professor of History, University of Puget Sound.

War and the Making of Medieval Monastic Culture
War and the Making of Medieval Monastic Culture

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781782047445

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"An extremely interesting and important book ... makes an important contribution to the history of medieval monastic spirituality in a formative period, whilst also fitting into wider debates on the origins, development and impact of ideas on crusading and holy war." Dr William Purkis, University of Birmingham. Monastic culture has generally been seen as set apart from the medieval battlefield, as "those who prayed" were set apart from "those who fought". However, in this first study of the place of war within medieval monastic culture, the author shows the limitations of this division. Through a wide reading of Latin sermons, letters, and hagiography, she identifies a monastic language of war that presented the monk as the archetypal "soldier of Christ" and his life of prayer as a continuous combat with the devil: indeed, monks' claims to supremacy on the spiritual battlefield grew even louder as Church leaders extended the title of "soldier of Christ" to lay knights and crusaders. So, while medieval monasteries have traditionally been portrayed as peaceful sanctuaries in a violent world, here the author demonstrates that monastic identity was negotiated through real and imaginary encounters with war, and that the concept of spiritual warfare informed virtually every aspect of life in the cloister. It thus breaks new ground in the history of European attitudes toward warfare and warriors in the age of the papal reform movement and the early crusades. Katherine Allen Smith is Assistant Professor of History, University of Puget Sound.

The Crafts and Culture of a Medieval Monastery
The Crafts and Culture of a Medieval Monastery

Author: Joann Jovinelly

Publisher: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc

Published: 2006-08-15

Total Pages: 56

ISBN-13: 9781404207592

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Includes instructions for making a monastery model, an illuminated manuscript, an herb garden, and a plague mask from available materials.

Inventing William of Norwich
Inventing William of Norwich

Author: Heather Blurton

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2022-05-06

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0812298535

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In Inventing William of Norwich Heather Blurton offers a revisionist reading of Thomas Monmouth's account of the saint's life that contains the earliest account of a Christian child ritually murdered by Jews. She demonstrates how innovations in literary forms in the twelfth century shaped the articulation of medieval antisemitism.

The Battle Rhetoric of Crusade and Holy War, c. 1099–c. 1222
The Battle Rhetoric of Crusade and Holy War, c. 1099–c. 1222

Author: Connor Christopher Wilson

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-11-25

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1000800148

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This book examines Latin narratives produced in the aftermath of the First Crusade and challenges the narrative of supposed brutality and amorality of warfare in this period--instead focusing on the moral and didactic concerns surrounding warfare and violence with which medieval authors wrestled. The battle oration, a rousing harangue exhorting warriors to deeds of valour, has been regarded as a significant aspect of warfare since the age of Xenophon, and has continued to influence conceptions of campaigning and combat to the present day. While its cultural and chronological pervasiveness attests to the power of this trope, scholarly engagement with the literary phenomenon of the pre-battle speech has been limited. Moreover, previous work on medieval battle rhetoric has only served to reinforce the supposed brutality and amorality of warfare in this period, highlighting appeals to martial prowess, a hatred for ‘the enemy’ and promises of wealth and glory. This book, through an examination of Latin narratives produced in the aftermath of the First Crusade and the decades that followed, challenges this understanding and illuminates the moral and didactic concerns surrounding warfare and violence with which medieval authors wrestled. Furthermore, while battle orations form a clear mechanism by which the fledgling crusading movement could be explored ideologically, this comparative study reveals how non-crusading warfare in this period was also being reconceptualised in light of changing ideas about just war, authority and righteousness in Christian society. This volume is perfect for researchers, students and scholars alike interested in medieval history and military studies.

Religious Rites of War beyond the Medieval West
Religious Rites of War beyond the Medieval West

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2023-11-07

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 9004686363

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This is Volume One of a two-volume collection that brings together contributions from cultural and military history to offer an examination of religious rites employed in connection with warfare as well as their transformative and power- and identity-building potential across political communities of medieval Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe. Covering the period ca. 900 and 1500, the work takes theoretical, textual and practical approaches to the research on religious warfare, and investigates the connections between, and significance and function of crucial war rituals such as pre-, intra- and postbellum rites, as well as various activities surrounding the military life of individuals, polities, and corporates. Contributors are Robert Antonín, Robert Bubczyk, Dariusz Dąbrowski, Jesse Harrington, Carsten Selch Jensen, Sini Kangas, Radosław Kotecki, Gregory Leighton, Kyle C. Lincoln, Jacek Maciejewski, Yulia Mikhailova, Max Naderer, László Veszprémy, and Dušan Zupka.

Remembering the Crusades in Medieval Texts and Songs
Remembering the Crusades in Medieval Texts and Songs

Author: Thomas W. Smith

Publisher: University of Wales Press

Published: 2019-10-15

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1786835061

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This book contributes to the flourishing interest in memory and the crusades. It offers a nuanced understanding of how medieval authors presented the crusades. It opens up new avenues for research into medieval texts and songs about the crusading movement.

The Church at War: The Military Activities of Bishops, Abbots and Other Clergy in England, c. 900-1200
The Church at War: The Military Activities of Bishops, Abbots and Other Clergy in England, c. 900-1200

Author: Daniel M. G. Gerrard

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-10-04

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1317038312

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The fighting bishop or abbot is a familiar figure to medievalists and much of what is known of the military organization of England in this period is based on ecclesiastical evidence. Unfortunately the fighting cleric has generally been regarded as merely a baron in clerical dress and has consequently fallen into the gap between military and ecclesiastical history. This study addresses three main areas: which clergy engaged in military activity in England, why and when? By what means did they do so? And how did others understand and react to these activities? The book shows that, however vivid such characters as Odo of Bayeux might be in the historical imagination, there was no archetypal militant prelate. There was enormous variation in the character of the clergy that became involved in warfare, their circumstances, the means by which they pursued their military objectives and the way in which they were treated by contemporaries and described by chroniclers. An appreciation of the individual fighting cleric must be both thematically broad and keenly aware of his context. Such individuals cannot therefore be simply slotted into easy categories, even (or perhaps especially) when those categories are informed by contemporary polemic. The implications of this study for our understanding of clerical identity are considerable, as the easy distinction between clerics acting in a secular or ecclesiastical capacity almost entirely breaks down and the legal structures of the period are shown to be almost as equivocal and idiosyncratic as the literary depictions. The implications for military history are equally striking as organisational structures are shown to be more temporary, fluid and 'political' than had previously been understood.

The Culture of Medieval English Monasticism
The Culture of Medieval English Monasticism

Author: James G. Clark

Publisher: Boydell Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9781843833215

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Examinations of the culture - artistic, material, musical - of English monasteries in the six centuries between the Conquest and the Dissolution. The cultural remains of England's abbeys and priories have always attracted scholarly attention but too often they have been studied in isolation, appreciated only for their artistic, codicological or intellectual features and notfor the insights they offer into the patterns of life and thought - the underlying norms, values and mentalité - of the communities of men and women which made them. Indeed, the distinguished monastic historian David Knowles doubted there would ever be sufficient evidence to recover "the mentality of the ordinary cloister monk". These twelve essays challenge this view. They exploit newly catalogued and newly discovered evidence - manuscript books, wall paintings, and even the traces of original monastic music - to recover the cultural dynamics of a cross-section of male and female communities. It is often claimed that over time the cultural traditions of the monasteries were suffocated by secular trends but here it is suggested that many houses remained a major cultural force even on the verge of the Reformation. James G. Clark is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. Contributors: DAVID BELL, ROGER BOWERS, JAMES CLARK, BARRIE COLLETT, MARY ERLER, G. R. EVANS, MIRIAM GILL, JOAN GREATREX, JULIAN HASELDINE, J. D. NORTH, ALAN PIPER, AND R. M. THOMSON.

Representing War and Violence
Representing War and Violence

Author: Joanna Bellis

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1783271558

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An examination of written and other responses to conflict in a variety of forms and genres, from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. War and violence took many forms in medieval and early modern Europe, from political and territorial conflict to judicial and social spectacle; from religious persecution and crusade to self-mortification and martyrdom; from comedic brutality to civil and domestic aggression. Various cultural frameworks conditioned both the acceptance of these forms of violence, and the protest that they met with: the elusive concept of chivalry, Christianity and just wartheory, political ambition and the machinery of propaganda, literary genres and the expectations they generated and challenged. The essays here, from the disciplines of history, art history and literature, explore how violence and conflict were documented, depicted, narrated and debated during this period. They consider manuals created for and addressed directly to kings and aristocratic patrons; romances whose affective treatments of violence invitedprofoundly empathetic, even troublingly pleasurable, responses; diaries and "autobiographies" compiled on the field and redacted for publication and self-promotion. The ethics and aesthetics of representation, as much as the violence being represented, emerge as a profound and constant theme for writers and artists grappling with this most fundamental and difficult topic of human experience. JOANNA BELLIS is the Fitzjames Research Fellow in Oldand Middle English at Merton College, Oxford; LAURA SLATER holds a Postdoctoral Fellowship from The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London. Contributors: Anne Baden-Daintree, Anne Curry, David Grummitt, Richard W. Kaeuper, Andrew Lynch, Christina Normore, Laura Slater, Sara V. Torres, Matthew Woodcock,