Religious Horror and Holy War in Viking Age Francia

Religious Horror and Holy War in Viking Age Francia PDF Author: Matthew Bryan Gillis
Publisher: Trivent Publishing
ISBN: 6156405216
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Religious Horror and Holy War in Viking Age Francia explores how authorities in western Francia used horror rhetoric to cast Christian soldiers, who robbed the poor and the church, as monsters that devoured human flesh and drank human blood. Adapting modern literary horror approaches to medieval sources, this study reveals how such rhetoric served as a form of spiritual weaponry in the clergy's attempts to correct and condemn wayward military men. This investigation, therefore, unearths long-forgotten Carolingian thought about the dreadful spiritual reality of internal enemies during a time of political division and the Northmens depredations. Yet such horror also informed a new understanding of Christian heroism that developed in relation to the wars fought against the invaders. This vision of heroic soldiers, which included military martyrs, culminated in ideas about holy war against the pagans. Thus Carolingian religious horror and holy war together belonged to a body of ideas about the spiritual, unseen side of the church's cosmic conflict against evil that foreshadowed later medieval Crusading thought.

Religious Horror and Holy War in Viking Age Francia

Religious Horror and Holy War in Viking Age Francia PDF Author: Matthew Bryan Gillis
Publisher: Trivent Publishing
ISBN: 6156405216
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Get Book

Book Description
Religious Horror and Holy War in Viking Age Francia explores how authorities in western Francia used horror rhetoric to cast Christian soldiers, who robbed the poor and the church, as monsters that devoured human flesh and drank human blood. Adapting modern literary horror approaches to medieval sources, this study reveals how such rhetoric served as a form of spiritual weaponry in the clergy's attempts to correct and condemn wayward military men. This investigation, therefore, unearths long-forgotten Carolingian thought about the dreadful spiritual reality of internal enemies during a time of political division and the Northmens depredations. Yet such horror also informed a new understanding of Christian heroism that developed in relation to the wars fought against the invaders. This vision of heroic soldiers, which included military martyrs, culminated in ideas about holy war against the pagans. Thus Carolingian religious horror and holy war together belonged to a body of ideas about the spiritual, unseen side of the church's cosmic conflict against evil that foreshadowed later medieval Crusading thought.

Religious Horror and Holy War in Viking Age Francia

Religious Horror and Holy War in Viking Age Francia PDF Author: Matthew Bryan Gillis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9786156405197
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Religious Rites of War beyond the Medieval West

Religious Rites of War beyond the Medieval West PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004686371
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
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.

Franks and Northmen

Franks and Northmen PDF Author: Daniel Melleno
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040030777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Franks and Northmen explores the full spectrum of Franco-Scandinavian interaction, examining not just violence but also less well-known relationships centered on acts of diplomacy, commerce, and mission and demonstrating the transformative nature of cross-cultural encounter during the Viking Age. In the year 777, the Frankish sources mention the Northmen, better known to most as the Vikings, for the first time. By the tenth century these Northmen, once a mysterious people on the borders of the Carolingian Empire, would be a familiar presence in the Frankish world. As raiders and pillagers, the Vikings would fill the pages of Frankish authors, leaving a legacy that continues to fascinate even to the twenty-first century. But a closer look at sources, both textual and material, reveals that the relationships between Franks and Northmen were far more complex and multifaceted than a rigid focus on Viking violence might suggest. Merchants carried goods across the North Sea, missionaries encouraged new ways of understanding the world, and Franks and Northmen formed relationships and bonds even amidst conflict and violence. This study is a useful resource for both students and specialists of central and northern Europe in the early medieval period.

In This Modern Age

In This Modern Age PDF Author: Courtney M. Booker
Publisher: Trivent Publishing
ISBN: 6156405674
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
In This Modern Age: Medieval Studies in Honor of Paul Edward Dutton is a collection of fourteen essays by scholars of the Carolingian era specializing in history, art history, and literature. The volume is divided into five sections, which treat early medieval Latin literary and historiographical culture, images and objects, interpretations of natural phenomena, and the subject of nostalgia. Reflecting Dutton's pathbreaking work, the contributions all evince the great impact of his teaching and erudition over the past thirty years since the publication of his seminal books Carolingian Civilization: A Reader (1993), The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire (1994), The Poetry and Paintings of the First Bible of Charles the Bald (with Herbert L. Kessler) (1997), Charlemagne's Courtier: The Complete Einhard (1998), Charlemagne's Mustache: And Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age (2004), together with his many influential articles. This body of highly distinctive, stimulating, and evocative scholarship has fundamentally transformed Carolingian studies, inspiring younger scholars to enter the field and encouraging established scholars to develop it in new directions. The essays in this volume individually pay tribute to Dutton in their illumination of diverse aspects of Carolingian intellectual, textual, and visual culture, with its famously idiosyncratic revival of Christian-Roman learning, aesthetics, and ideas. Gathered together, they offer an expression of gratitude for the risks that he took and the generosity that he has always shown.

Between Prophecy and Apocalypse

Between Prophecy and Apocalypse PDF Author: Matthew Gabriele
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198895518
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
The tenth and eleventh centuries in medieval Europe are commonly seen as a time of uncertainty and loss: an age of lawless aristocrats, of weak political authority, of cultural decline and dissolute monks, and of rampant superstition. It is a period often judged from its margins, compared (mostly negatively) to what came before and what would follow. We impose upon it both a sense of nostalgia and a teleology, as they somehow knowingly foreshadow what is to come. Seeking to complicate this mischaracterisation, which is primarily the invention of nineteenth and early twentieth century historiography, this book maps the movement between two intellectual stances: a shift from prophetic to apocalyptic thinking. Although the roots of this change lay in Late Antiquity, the fulcrum of this transition lies in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Biblical commentators in the fourth and fifth centuries enforced a particular understanding of sacred time that held until the ninth century, when exegetes of the ninth century found in their commentaries a different plan for God's new chosen people. This came into stark relief as the new kingdom of Israel (the Frankish empire under the Carolingians) had splintered in the 840s. God was manifesting his displeasure with the chosen people by fire and sword. What was perhaps unforeseen was that these commentaries that were written in the specific context of the Carolingian Civil War would be heavily copied and read for the next 200 years. Ideas that formed in a world that actively lamented the loss of empire had to be translated to a world that could only dream of that empire. As they spread across Europe, these ideas became the basis for monastic educational practices, and bled into other types of textual production, such as supposedly "secular" histories. Between Prophecy and Apocalypse charts an intellectual transformation triggered when the prescriptions laid out towards the end of the Carolingian empire began to be "realized" in subsequent centuries. Nostalgia entwined with an attentiveness to possible futures and spun together so tightly as to become a double helix. Ultimately, this book will offer a way to understand the central Middle Ages, a period of dynamic intellectual ferment when ideas could inspire action and (seemingly banal) conceptions of time and history could inspire moments of dramatic transformation and horrific violence.

Nordic Religions in the Viking Age

Nordic Religions in the Viking Age PDF Author: Thomas Andrew DuBois
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812217148
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Thomas DuBois unravels for the first time the history of the Nordic religions in the Viking Age. "A seminal study of Nordic religions that future scholars will not be able to avoid."—Church History

The Viking Way

The Viking Way PDF Author: Neil S. Price
Publisher: Oxbow Books Limited
ISBN: 9789150616262
Category : Archaelogy and religion
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
Magic, sorcery and witchcraft are among the most common themes of the great medieval Icelandic sagas and poems, the problematic yet vital sources that provide our primary textual evidence for the Viking Age that they claim to describe. Yet despite the consistency of this picture, surprisingly little archaeological or historical research has been done to explore what this may really have meant to the men and women of the time. This book examines the evidence for Old Norse sorcery, looking at its meaning and function, practice and practitioners, and the complicated constructions of gender and sexual identity with which these were underpinned. Combining strong elements of eroticism and aggression, sorcery appears as a fundamental domain of women's power, linking them with the gods, the dead and the future. Their battle spells and combat rituals complement the men's physical acts of fighting, in a supernatural empowerment of the Viking way of life. What emerges is a fundamentally new image of the world in which the Vikings understood themselves to move, in which magic and its implications permeated every aspect of a society permanently geared for war. In this fully revised and expanded second edition, Neil Price takes us with him on a tour through the sights and sounds of this undiscovered country, meeting its human and otherworldly inhabitants, including the Sami with whom the Norse partly shared this mental landscape. On the way we explore Viking notions of the mind and soul, the fluidity of the boundaries that they drew between humans and animals, and the immense variety of their spiritual beliefs. We find magic in the Vikings' bedrooms and on their battlefields, and we meet the sorcerers themselves through their remarkable burials and the tools of their trade. Combining archaeology, history and literary scholarship with extensive studies of Germanic and circumpolar religion, this multi-award-winning book shows us the Vikings as we have never seen them before.

The Tablet

The Tablet PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 1056

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Book Description


Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire

Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire PDF Author: Matthew Bryan Gillis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198797583
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Recounts the history of an exceptional ninth-century religious outlaw, Gottschalk of Orbais-a priest who developed a controversial, Augustinian-based theology of predestination that directly contradicted Carolingian beliefs, showing how the Carolingian Empire preserved order within the Frankish Christian church through coercive reform.