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The Church at War: The Military Activities of Bishops, Abbots and Other Clergy in England, c. 900-1200 (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R4,458
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The Church at War: The Military Activities of Bishops, Abbots and Other Clergy in England, c. 900-1200 (Hardcover)
Series: Church, Faith and Culture in the Medieval West
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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The fighting bishop or abbot is a familiar figure to medievalists
and much of what is known of the military organization of England
in this period is based on ecclesiastical evidence. Unfortunately
the fighting cleric has generally been regarded as merely a baron
in clerical dress and has consequently fallen into the gap between
military and ecclesiastical history. This study addresses three
main areas: which clergy engaged in military activity in England,
why and when? By what means did they do so? And how did others
understand and react to these activities? The book shows that,
however vivid such characters as Odo of Bayeux might be in the
historical imagination, there was no archetypal militant prelate.
There was enormous variation in the character of the clergy that
became involved in warfare, their circumstances, the means by which
they pursued their military objectives and the way in which they
were treated by contemporaries and described by chroniclers. An
appreciation of the individual fighting cleric must be both
thematically broad and keenly aware of his context. Such
individuals cannot therefore be simply slotted into easy
categories, even (or perhaps especially) when those categories are
informed by contemporary polemic. The implications of this study
for our understanding of clerical identity are considerable, as the
easy distinction between clerics acting in a secular or
ecclesiastical capacity almost entirely breaks down and the legal
structures of the period are shown to be almost as equivocal and
idiosyncratic as the literary depictions. The implications for
military history are equally striking as organisational structures
are shown to be more temporary, fluid and 'political' than had
previously been understood.
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