Sini Kangas

This is Volume Two 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.

https://brill.com/display/title/69111?fbclid=IwAR2Lvkpc3cSGcp94MbwDLgw3ff6AG-1jpxOBQYRjlBIHXYJ0pvphJtQEZDA

This article considers the definitions of evil in the twelfth- and early thirteenth-century sources of the crusades. Research material consists of crusader chronicles and vernacular poetry, the so-called first and second crusader cycles and their continuations. The survey begins with a brief account of the historical background of the crusades and turns then into more specific questions of the medieval ideas related to evil and vice in crusading context. In this setting, the concept of sin is crucially important. The discussion concludes with some further remarks on sacred violence as a medieval tool for confronting and resolving the powers of evil.

This collaborative collection provides fresh perspectives on Christianity and the conduct of war in medieval East Central Europe and Scandina-via, investigating the intersection between religion, culture, and warfare in territories that were only integrated into Christendom in the Central Middle Ages. The contributors analyze cultures that lay outside Charle-magne's limes and the frontiers of the Byzantine Empire, to consider a region stretching from the Balkans to the south, through Hungary and the Slavic lands (Poland, Bohemia, Rus), to the Baltic coastline with Polabia, Pomerania, Prussia, and Estonia, and reaching into Scandinavia. The volume considers clerics as military leaders and propagandists, the role of Christian ritual and doctrine in warfare, and the adaptation and transformation of indigenous military cultures. It uncovers new information on perceptions of war and analyzes how local practices were incorporated into clerical narratives, enabling the reader to achiev...

This volume, the first in the new series Transcultural Medieval Studies, draws together scholars from around the world to offer new insights into the importance and role of the Bible across the varied cultures of medieval Europe. The papers gathered here take a comparative and multidisciplinary approach to the subject, focusing on the biblical background of perceptions of the religious and cultural ‘Self ’ and ‘Other’ in the Mediterranean, in Latin Europe, and in the Baltic. In doing so, the contributions identify commonalities and differences of the ‘uses of the Bible’ in these various worlds, combining and contrasting studies on Bible manuscripts, their exegesis, and their use for historical writing.

Several twelfth- and early thirteenth-century sources of the crusades mention the killing of children who took part in the crusades.  The descriptions of slain children are laden with ambivalence and metaphoric meanings. In these texts, the violent death of a child indicates indiscriminate slaughter, mortal sin and criminal action, but also the glorious victory of martyrs entering the kingdom of heaven. The victims’ end is abrupt, often abhorrently brutal and has no causal relation to their previous activities. These characteristics turn crusader children into a link in a chain of child martyrs, beginning with the biblical Slaughter of the Holy Innocents. Like the references to the Maccabees  or other Israelite heroes as both examples of ideal crusaders and as the first generation in a long line of chosen people that culminates in the noble participants of the crusades, the Innocents function as role models of heroic crusader children in the textual and visual tradition of the crusades. Why was it important to underline the innocence of those who suffered? What was the actual role of dying children in crusade propaganda?

Medievalists reading and writing about and around authority-related themes lack clear definitions of its actual meanings in the medieval context. Authorities in the Middle Ages offers answers to this thorny issue through specialized investigations.

This book considers the concept of authority and explores the various practices of creating authority in medieval society. In their studies sixteen scholars investigate the definition, formation, establishment, maintenance, and collapse of what we understand in terms of medieval struggles for authority, influence and power. The interdisciplinary nature of this volume resonates with the multi-faceted field of medieval culture, its social structures, and forms of communication. The fields of expertise include history, legal studies, theology, philosophy, politics, literature and art history.

The scope of inquiry extends from late antiquity to the mid-fifteenth century, from the Church Fathers debating with pagans to the rapacious ghosts ruining the life of the living in the Sagas. There is a special emphasis on such exciting but understudied areas as the Balkans, Iceland and the eastern fringes of Scandinavia.

Sini Kangas
Published 2013
6 Views
1 File ▾
Geography,
Medieval History,
Medieval Studies,
Crusades,
Church History
...more ▾
Show more ▾
Authorities in the Middle Ages investigates the definition, establishment, and collapse of medieval authority from antiquity to the mid-fifteenth century. The interdisciplinary approach resonates with the multi-faceted field of medieval culture, its social structures, and various forms of communication, in various disciplines. There is a special emphasis on such understudied areas as the Balkans, Iceland and the eastern fringes of Scandinavia.

Medieval Westerners accepted killing for religion and praised the outcome of the First Crusade (1096-1099). At the same time, their attitude to violence was ambivalent. Theologians shunned the practical use of force, while the warrior aristocracy valued the capacity for physical destruction. In the absence of theological doctrine on the practicalities of holy warfare, the first crusaders draw their ideas about killing from diverse and sometimes conflicting traditions.
This book answers questions about how religious violence was described, justified and remembered in the sources of the First Crusade. What was the relation between faith, convention, and action?

https://brill.com/display/title/15776