Crusades and Violence
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Arc Humanities Press
Published:30th Jun '23
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
How was violence understood and justified during the time of the crusades? This book argues that although just/holy war theory has long provided the framework for explaining crusading violence, cultural history gives us deeper insights into the meaning and conduct of medieval crusading warfare. Using a range of sources including histories, letters, and material culture from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this book provides fresh insights into medieval violence and the history of the crusades. It shows how violence was debated, defined, worried about, celebrated, and condemned, and that the boundaries of legitimate and illegitimate conduct in crusading warfare were constantly and consciously tested.
Cassidy-Welch [...] concentrates on the 12th and 13th centuries and employs in her introduction and three chapters a cultural and social framework through the prisms of physical space, the body, emotions, and memory. Topics include the channeling of violence through the Peace and Truce of God movements, piety and spiritual benefits as distinctive elements of crusading, the protection of missionaries and other Christians as justifications for violence, the feminization of sacred spaces, supposedly promised lands as the locations of violence, the othering of enemies, the corporality of both inflictors and victims of violence, retributive violence, Christ-centered self-mortification and martyrdom, and the interplay of violence and religious apocalypticism. Crusade violence had various psychological, celebratory, communicative, and performative dimensions. Cassidy-Welch even attempts to link her inquiries with a brief consideration of the echoes of crusade violence in medievalism since the 19th century. Her aim is to avoid overarching, summative conclusions while prompting further inquiry and discussion. -- R. C. Figueira * Choice 62, no. 3 (November 2024): online *
ISBN: 9781641894753
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
104 pages
New edition