E-Books →The Sleep of Behemoth Disputing Peace and Violence in Medieval Europe, 1000–1200

Free Download Jehangir Malegam, "The Sleep of Behemoth: Disputing Peace and Violence in Medieval Europe, 1000-1200"
English | ISBN: 0801451329 | 2013 | 352 pages | EPUB | 1305 KB
In The Sleep of Behemoth, Jehangir Yezdi Malegam explores the emergence of conflicting concepts of peace in western Europe during the High Middle Ages. Ever since the early Church, Christian thinkers had conceived of their peace separate from the peace of the world, guarded by the sacraments and shared only grudgingly with powers and principalities. To kingdoms and communities they had allowed attenuated versions of this peace, modes of accommodation and domination that had tranquility as the goal. After 1000, reformers in the papal curia and monks and canons in the intellectual circles of northern France began to reimagine the Church as an engine of true peace, whose task it was eventually to absorb all peoples through progressive acts of revolutionary peacemaking. Peace as they envisioned it became a mandate for reform through conflict, coercion, and insurrection. And the pursuit of mere tranquility appeared dangerous, and even diabolical.