Violence in Medieval Europe

Violence in Medieval Europe PDF Author: Warren C. Brown
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317866215
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
The European Middle Ages have long attracted popular interest as an era characterised by violence, whether a reflection of societal brutality and lawlessness or part of a romantic vision of chivalry. Violence in Medieval Europe engages with current scholarly debate about the degree to which medieval European society was in fact shaped by such forces. Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources, Warren Brown examines the norms governing violence within medieval societies from the sixth to the fourteenth century, over an area covering the Romance and the Germanic-speaking regions of the continent as well as England. Scholars have often told the story of violence and power in the Middle Ages as one in which 'private' violence threatened and sometimes destroyed 'public' order. Yet academics are now asking to what degree violence that we might call private, in contrast to the violence wielded by a central authority, might have been an effective social tool. Here, Brown looks at how private individuals exercised violence in defence of their rights or in vengeance for wrongs within a set of clearly understood social rules, and how over the course of this period, kings began to claim the exclusive right to regulate the violence of their subjects as part of their duty to uphold God's order on earth. Violence in Medieval Europe provides both an original take on the subject and an illuminating synthesis of recent and classic scholarship. It will be invaluable to students and scholars of history, medieval studies and related areas, for the light it casts not just on violence, but on the evolution of the medieval political order.

Violence in Medieval Europe

Violence in Medieval Europe PDF Author: Warren C. Brown
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317866215
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Get Book Here

Book Description
The European Middle Ages have long attracted popular interest as an era characterised by violence, whether a reflection of societal brutality and lawlessness or part of a romantic vision of chivalry. Violence in Medieval Europe engages with current scholarly debate about the degree to which medieval European society was in fact shaped by such forces. Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources, Warren Brown examines the norms governing violence within medieval societies from the sixth to the fourteenth century, over an area covering the Romance and the Germanic-speaking regions of the continent as well as England. Scholars have often told the story of violence and power in the Middle Ages as one in which 'private' violence threatened and sometimes destroyed 'public' order. Yet academics are now asking to what degree violence that we might call private, in contrast to the violence wielded by a central authority, might have been an effective social tool. Here, Brown looks at how private individuals exercised violence in defence of their rights or in vengeance for wrongs within a set of clearly understood social rules, and how over the course of this period, kings began to claim the exclusive right to regulate the violence of their subjects as part of their duty to uphold God's order on earth. Violence in Medieval Europe provides both an original take on the subject and an illuminating synthesis of recent and classic scholarship. It will be invaluable to students and scholars of history, medieval studies and related areas, for the light it casts not just on violence, but on the evolution of the medieval political order.

Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe

Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe PDF Author: Richard W. Kaeuper
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199244588
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Medieval Europe was a rapidly developing society with a problem of violent disorder. Professor Kaeuper's original and authoritative study reveals that chivalry was just as much a part of this problem as it was its solution. Chivalry praised heroic violence by knights, and fused such displaysof prowess with honour, piety, high-status, and attractiveness to women. Though the vast body of chivalric literature praised chivalry as necessary to civilization, most texts also worried over knightly violence, criticized the ideals and practices of chivalry, and often proposed reforms. Theknights themselves joined the debate, absorbing some reforms, ignoring others, sometimes proposing their own. The interaction of chivalry with major governing institutions ("church" and "state") emerging at that time was similarly complex: kings and clerics both needed and feared the force of theknighthood. This fascinating book lays bare these conflicts and paradoxes which surrounded the concept of chivalry in medieval Europe.

Violence in Medieval Society

Violence in Medieval Society PDF Author: Richard W. Kaeuper
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 9780851157740
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Studies of ways in which the rapidly evolving society of medieval Europe developed social, legal and practical responses to public and private violence.

Christianity and Violence in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period

Christianity and Violence in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period PDF Author: Fernanda Alfieri
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110643979
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
The volume explores the relationship between religion and violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Early modern period, involving European and Japanese scholars. It investigates the ideological foundations of the relationship between violence and religion and their development in a varied corpus of sources (political and theological treatises, correspondence of missionaries, pamphlets, and images).

Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Allie Terry-Fritsch
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9781409442868
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Interrogating how medieval and early modern communities have acted as participants, observers, and interpreters of events and how they ascribed meaning to them, the essays in this collection explore the experience of individual or collective beholders of violence during the period. Addressing a range of medieval and early modern art forms, including visual images, objects, texts, and performances, the contributors examine the complexities of viewing and the production of knowledge across temporal moments.

A History of Violence

A History of Violence PDF Author: Robert Muchembled
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745647472
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Presents a history of violence in Europe and discusses the theory that violence has actually been in decline since the thirteenth century.

Communities of Violence

Communities of Violence PDF Author: David Nirenberg
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691165769
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
In the wake of modern genocide, we tend to think of violence against minorities as a sign of intolerance, or, even worse, a prelude to extermination. Violence in the Middle Ages, however, functioned differently, according to David Nirenberg. In this provocative book, he focuses on specific attacks against minorities in fourteenth-century France and the Crown of Aragon (Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia). He argues that these attacks--ranging from massacres to verbal assaults against Jews, Muslims, lepers, and prostitutes--were often perpetrated not by irrational masses laboring under inherited ideologies and prejudices, but by groups that manipulated and reshaped the available discourses on minorities. Nirenberg shows that their use of violence expressed complex beliefs about topics as diverse as divine history, kinship, sex, money, and disease, and that their actions were frequently contested by competing groups within their own society. Nirenberg's readings of archival and literary sources demonstrates how violence set the terms and limits of coexistence for medieval minorities. The particular and contingent nature of this coexistence is underscored by the book's juxtapositions--some systematic (for example, that of the Crown of Aragon with France, Jew with Muslim, medieval with modern), and some suggestive (such as African ritual rebellion with Catalan riots). Throughout, the book questions the applicability of dichotomies like tolerance versus intolerance to the Middle Ages, and suggests the limitations of those analyses that look for the origins of modern European persecutory violence in the medieval past.

Conflict in Medieval Europe

Conflict in Medieval Europe PDF Author: Warren C. Brown
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351949721
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Conflict is defined here broadly and inclusively as an element of social life and social relations. Its study encompasses the law, not just disputes concerning property, but wider issues of criminality, coercion and violence, status, sex, sexuality and gender, as well as the phases and manifestations of conflict and the behaviors brought to bear on it. It engages, too, with the nature of the transformation spanning the Carolingian period, and its implications for the meanings of power, violence, and peace. Conflict in Medieval Europe represents the 'American school' of the study of medieval conflict and social order. Framed by two substantial historiographical and conceptual surveys of the field, it brings together two generations of scholars: the pioneers, who continue to expand the research agenda; and younger colleagues, who represent the best emerging work on this subject. The book therefore both marks the trajectory of conflict studies in the United States and presents a set of original, highly individual contributions across a shifting conceptual range, indicative of a major transition in the field.

Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West

Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West PDF Author: Guy Halsall
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 9780851158495
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Essays suggest or explore reasons why violent acts might have been perpetrated, and attempt to understand the social priorities which governed such acts. Thought-provoking and characterized by a high level of scholarship. HISTORYAn important addition to the dialogue concerning the nature of conflict and its resolution in the early medieval West. HISTORIAN [US] The `violence' oflife in the middle ages is nowadays both taken for granted and little understood. The essays in this collection all suggest or explore reasons why violent acts might have been perpetrated, and attempt to understand the social priorities which governed such acts. Broadly, the studies clarify issues relating to the creation of political identities and the establishment of social order, and cover matters of administration, religious ritual, and gender.Contributors: GUY HALSALL, LUIS A. GARCIA MORENO, PAUL FOURACRE, T.S. BROWN, JANET L. NELSON, N.B. AITCHISON, MATTHEW BENNETT, GUY A.E. MORRIS, S.J. SPEIGHT, ROSS BALZARETTI, JULIE COLEMAN, NANCY L. WICKER. GUY HALSALL is lecturer in the Department of History, Birkbeck College, University of London. Contributors: GUY HALSALL, LUIS A. GARCIA MORENO, PAUL FOURACRE, T.S. BROWN, JANET L. NELSON, N.B. AITCHISON, MATTHEW BENNETT, GUY A.E. MORRIS, S.J. SPEIGHT, ROSS BALZARETTI, JULIE COLEMAN, NANCY L. WICKER.

Defaced

Defaced PDF Author: Valentin Groebner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Understanding late medieval pictorial representations of violence. Destroyed faces, dissolved human shapes, invisible enemies: violence and anonymity go hand in hand. The visual representation of extreme physical violence makes real people nameless exemplars of horror--formless, hideous, defaced. In Defaced, Valentin Groebner explores the roots of the visual culture of violence in medieval and Renaissance Europe and shows how contemporary visual culture has been shaped by late medieval images and narratives of violence. For late medieval audiences, as with modern media consumers, horror lies less in the "indescribable" and "alien" than in the familiar and commonplace. From the fourteenth century onward, pictorial representations became increasingly violent, whether in depictions of the Passion, or in vivid and precise images of torture, execution, and war. But not every spectator witnessed the same thing when confronted with terrifying images of a crucified man, misshapen faces, allegedly bloodthirsty conspirators on nocturnal streets, or barbarian fiends on distant battlefields. The profusion of violent imagery provoked a question: how to distinguish the illegitimate violence that threatened and reversed the social order from the proper, "just," and sanctioned use of force? Groebner constructs a persuasive answer to this question by investigating how uncannily familiar medieval dystopias were constructed and deconstructed. Showing how extreme violence threatens to disorient, and how the effect of horror resides in the depiction of minute details, Groebner offers an original model for understanding how descriptions of atrocities and of outrageous cruelty depended, in medieval times, on the variation of familiar narrative motifs.