Related Papers
Ecclesia et Violentia: Violence against the Church and Violence within the Church in the Middle Ages, ed. Radosław Kotecki and Jacek Maciejewski, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
The Clergy’s Complaints and Pleas to Rulers for Protection from Violence in France and the Empire (10th–12th Centuries)
2014 •
Radosław Kotecki
Violence and the State in Later Medieval Languedoc, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought 95 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2014; paperback 2017)
Justine Firnhaber-Baker
This book reassesses the relationship between the late medieval rise of the state in France and aristocratic violence. Although it is often assumed that resurgent royal government eliminated so-called private warfare, the French judicial archives reveal nearly 100 such wars waged in Languedoc and the Auvergne from the mid-thirteenth through the fourteenth century. Royal administrators often intervened in these wars, but not always in order to suppress ‘private violence’ in favour of ‘public justice’. Their efforts were strongly shaped by the recognition of elites’ own power and legitimate prerogatives, and elites were often fully complicit with royal intervention. Much of the engagement between royal officers and local elites came through informal processes of negotiation and settlement, rather than through the coercive imposition of official justice. The expansion of royal authority was due as much to local cooperation as to conflict, a fact that ensured its survival during the fourteenth-century’s crises
Fontenoy and after: Pursuing enemies to death in France from the ninth to the eleventh century
John Gillingham
“From God’s Peace to the King’s Order: Late Medieval Limitations on Non-Royal Warfare.” Essays in Medieval Studies. Vol. 23 (2006/7): 19-30
Justine Firnhaber-Baker
2013. Review of Elizabeth Tyler (ed.), Conceptualizing Multilingualism in Medieval England, c. 800-c.1250, Brepols, Turnhout, 2012. in Parergon 30, 2, pp.254-256.
Joshua Brown
'Is Warfare Sinful?’: The Development of Thought, c. 900-1200
Jim Pennell
The social violence that ensued following the breakdown of the Carolingian Empire catalyzed a proliferation of interest in the moral status of homicide, and the widely held belief that one’s actions on earth had eternal consequences on the soul made this issue especially pressing. Thus, the question of whether warfare constituted a sin before God preoccupied canonists, ecclesiastics, and the laity alike. The present essay aims to trace out the development of thought on the moral status of war in the period 900-1200. As will be demonstrated, ecclesiastical discipline in the earlier half of this era motivated a general though not universally-held belief in the absolute sinfulness of homicide, even when committed within a just war. However, events leading to and surrounding the Gregorian reforms and the Crusades elicited not only an admission of the moral permissibility of war, but also a belief in its quality as a positive religious duty when conducted for the defense or expansion of Christendom.
Violence in the Medieval Church before the First Crusade
2004 •
Joseph Jewell
The attitude of the medieval church towards violence before the First Crusade in 1095 underwent a significant institutional evolution, from the peaceful tradition of the New Testament and the Roman persecution, through the prelate-led military campaigns of the Carolingian period and the Peace of God era. It would be superficially easy to characterize this transformation as the pragmatic and entirely secular response of a growing power to the changing world. However, such a simplification does not fully do justice to the underlying theology. While church leaders from the 5th Century to the 11th had vastly different motivations and circ*mstances under which to develop their responses to a variety of violent activities, the teachings of Augustine of Hippo provided a unifying theme. Augustine’s just war theology, in establishing which conflicts are acceptable in the eyes of God, focused on determining whether a proper causa belli or basis for war exists, and then whether a legitimate au...
Christianity and War in Medieval East Central Europe and Scandinavia, ed. by R. Kotecki, C. Selch Jensen, S. Bennett
Rhetoric of War: The Imagination of War in Medieval Written Sources (Central and Eastern Europe in the high Middle Ages)
2021 •
Ludmila Lunakova, David Kalhous
The joint chapter by David Kalhous and Ludmila Luňáková scrutinizes this imagination of war through selected medieval chronicles and histories written between the 950s and 1120s in East Central and Eastern Europe: Chronica Boemorum by Cosmas of Prague, Gesta principum Polonorum by so- called Gallus Anonymus, the Povest’ vremennykh let, and also the Saxon history written by Widukind of Corvey. Kalhous and Luňáková observe that, although it is widely accepted that war and military elites were followed with suspicion by the Church, its individual clerics and chroniclers were far more tolerant of these phenomena. From afore- mentioned authors, who were all monks or members of the clergy, only Cosmas of Prague did not spend too much ink on the glorification of military success. All of his fellow chroniclers at least tried to legitimize the wars led by their polities- nations. That means that the chroniclers sought legitimacy in describing a war. In addition, they accepted it as a regular and legitimate part of life— a life of Christian and truly Christianized communities. The authors note that this approach is consistent with historiographies written in the post- Carolingian period when different ethnic groups came into being and defined their position within the Christian communities as political communities.
History
The Fifth Crusade in Context: The Crusading Movement in the Early Thirteenth Century. Edited by E. J.Mylod, GuyPerry, Thomas W.Smith and JanVandeburie. Routledge. 2017. xxii + 240pp. £95.00
2017 •
Jan Vandeburie
Jelle Haemers
