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E-book
Author Malegam, Jehangir Yezdi, 1976-

Title The sleep of Behemoth : disputing peace and violence in medieval Europe, 1000/1200 / Jehangir Yezdi Malegam
Published Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2013

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Description 1 online resource
Series UPCC book collections on Project MUSE. History
Contents Millennial reform and revisions of peace -- The papal reform : peace espoused and repudiated -- False sacraments : violence, captivity and insurrection -- Dueling sacraments : the communion of Judas Iscariot -- Mediations between self and society : peace, discretion and discipline -- Peacemaking, ecclesiology and evangelism -- Communes : inversions of peace -- Disciplining Behemoth : provisions for secular peace
Summary 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. As Malegam shows, within western Christendom's major centers of intellectual activity and political thought, the clergy competed over the meaning and monopolization of the term "peace." contrasting it with what one canon lawyer called the "sleep of Behemoth," a diabolical "false" peace of lassitude and complacency, one that produced unsuitable forms of community and friendship that must be overturned at all costs. Out of this contest over the meaning and ownership of true peace, Malegam concludes, medieval thinkers developed theologies that shaped secular political theory in the later Middle Ages. The Sleep of Behemoth traces this radical experiment in redefining the meaning of peace from the papal courts of Rome and the schools of Laon, Liege, and Paris to its gradual spread across the continent and its impact on such developments as the rise of papal monarchism; the growth of urban, communal self-government; and the emergence of secular and mystical scholasticism
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes In English
Print version record
SUBJECT Europa gnd
Subject Peace -- Religious aspects -- Catholic Church -- History -- To 1500
Violence -- Religious aspects -- Catholic Church -- History -- To 1500
Christianity and politics -- Europe -- History -- To 1500
Christianity and politics -- Catholic Church -- History -- To 1500
HISTORY -- Medieval.
RELIGION -- Christian Life -- Social Issues.
RELIGION -- Christianity -- General.
Christianity and politics
Christianity and politics -- Catholic Church
Peace -- Religious aspects -- Catholic Church
Violence -- Religious aspects -- Catholic Church
Christentum
Friedensbemühung
Gewalttätigkeit
Politik
SUBJECT Europe -- Church history -- 600-1500. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85045634
Subject Europe
Genre/Form Church history
History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2012038927
ISBN 0801467896
9780801467899