by M. Cecilia Gaposchkin (Author)
In 1098, three years into the First Crusade and after a brutal eight-month siege, the Franks captured the city of Antioch. Two days later, Muslim forces arrived with a relief army, and the victors became the besieged. Exhausted and ravaged by illness and hunger, the Franks were exhorted by their religious leaders to supplicate God, and for three days they performed a series of liturgical exercises, beseeching God through ritual prayer to forgive their sins and grant them victory. The following day, the Christian army, accompanied by bishops and priests reciting psalms and hymns, marched out of the city to face the Muslim forces and won a resounding and improbable victory.
From the very beginning and throughout the history of the Crusades, liturgical prayer, masses, and alms were all marshaled in the fight against the Muslim armies. During the Fifth Crusade, Pope Honorius III likened liturgy to invisible weapons. This book is about those invisible weapons; about the prayers and liturgical rituals that were part of the battle for the faith. M. Cecilia Gaposchkin tells the story of the greatest collective religious undertaking of the Middle Ages, putting front and center the ways in which Latin Christians communicated their ideas and aspirations for crusade to God through liturgy, how liturgy was deployed in crusading, and how liturgy absorbed ideals or priorities of crusading. Liturgy helped construct the devotional ideology of the crusading project, endowing war with religious meaning, placing crusading ideals at the heart of Christian identity, and embedding crusading warfare squarely into the eschatological economy. By connecting medieval liturgical books with the larger narrative of crusading, Gaposchkin allows us to understand a crucial facet in the culture of holy war.
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 200
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 17 Jan 2017
ISBN 10: 1501705156
ISBN 13: 9781501705151
In Invisible Weapons, M. Cecilia Gaposchkin draws together two highly technical, specialized fields-crusades studies and liturgical studies. Her use of unpublished manuscript materials provides a great service to students of the crusade. For liturgists, Invisible Weapons will prove to be similarly useful and provocative, casting light on how church ceremonies evolved and adapted to specific historical circumstances.
-- Jay Rubenstein, University of Tennessee-Knoxville, author of Armies of HeavenIn this tremendously engaging and important book, M. Cecilia Gaposchkin deftly reveals the centrality of liturgical ideas and practices to the crusading movement. In clear and convincing style she takes us through the evolution of crusading ideology and then links developments in liturgical texts and practices with the broader narrative of crusading history. In her accessible and impressive use of these often-neglected materials, she convincingly demonstrates how these 'invisible weapons' formed yet another dimension of crusading's impact on the people of western Europe.
-- Jonathan Phillips, Royal Holloway, University of London, author of Holy WarriorsM. Cecilia Gaposchkin's new book represents the cutting edge of modern crusade studies. It establishes liturgy as a defining force of medieval crusading, its practice, and its ideology.
-- Christoph T. Maier, University of Zurich, author of Crusade Propaganda and IdeologyThis is a fundamental book. Building on Amnon Linder's pioneering studies, M. Cecilia Gaposchkin reveals with clarity of pen the importance of the Latin Christian liturgy for the crusades. Liturgy provided key notions to warriors even before the First Crusade; it was adapted regionally to the vagaries in time and place of holy war, this over the centuries, all the way to the Ottoman expansion. It expressed and spread, in alternating waves, apocalyptic hopes, disappointments, the mandate of reform and purification. Critically, the book makes clear how the liturgy transmitted to European culture at large clerical notions of Sacred History, divine will, vengeance, penance, and necessary reform, and so made the crusade a total cultural form, impacting and involving all Western and Central Europeans.
-- Philippe Buc, Institut fur Geschichte, Universitat Wien, author of Holy War, Martyrdom, and TerrorWith alert, exact, meticulous scholarship on an impressively rich array of primary sources, M. Cecilia Gaposchkin reveals the precise liturgical frame behind the origins, shape, and development of crusade ideology across four centuries. This fresh, lucid, compelling, and accessible analysis of complex evidence provides a comprehensive study of how crusading was imagined within the context of wider Christian worship and religious culture. Gaposchkin's forensic study of how ideas on holy war were articulated in regular devotional observance offers access more generally to the public operation of medieval mentalities. Anyone with an interest in crusader studies or in the relationship of formal religious practice with the aspirations of popular faith will benefit from engaging with this significant contribution.
-- Christopher Tyerman, University of Oxford, author of How to Plan a CrusadeGaposchkin delivers her argument not only with historical exactitude and ingenuity, but also with the care of a seasoned educator.... Gaposchkin's work stands at the top of crusade studies. Her work will strengthen the syllabi of seminars dedicated to liturgical history, especially of the medieval and crusading periods, and associated reading lists for doctoral students.
* Homiletic *
FREE UK DELIVERY 
Global shipping from £2.99
FREE UK DELIVERY
30 Day Refund Guarantee
