Session Abstract

This session, sponsored by the Medieval Academy of America, will be concerned with justifications for violence during the European Middle Ages. Specifically, the presenters will examine how “Lives, Places, Stories” were redeployed, how the narratives of the Old and New Testaments were moved across time and space, from ancient Israel to Aquitaine, England, and back to the twelfth-century Holy Land and how these elements recombined to speak to moments of intense religious violence by Christians against both Muslims and their fellow Christians. The session will be of interest to medievalists of all stripes but will also engage the AHA’s wider membership in its discussions of narrative, religion, violence, and the power of ideas in history. 

Matthew Gabriele will begin the session by looking at a selection of early eleventh-century monastic authors whose works are read to be evidence of the violence and chaos of contemporary Aquitaine. Yet, what seems to have been missed is how they all read the past and present typologically, so that, in their common conceptions of the arc of sacred history, they retold the story of the Israelites in a new place – theirs. Therefore, understanding how these authors conceptualized the struggles of the new chosen people will allow us to rethink the reality of the “violent eleventh century.” Next Katherine Allen Smith will analyze citations from the New Testament that appear the early twelfth-century chronicles of the First Crusade, which successfully took Jerusalem in 1099 CE. The selective references, in the end, presented the crusade as the herald of a new apostolic age, one typologically linked to the miraculous events described in the Gospels and Acts. Our third presenter, Jay Rubenstein, will use the unpublished exegesis and historical worldview of Radulfus Niger, a twelfth-century critic of crusading, to consider how prophecy began to be decoupled from history. Radulfus attempted to elevate the moral significance of biblical passages on warfare. In doing so, he severed the connections between a literal reading of these verses and readings based on prophecy, meaning, for example, that apocalyptic readings of Jerusalem in the Bible ought to be examined through the prism of allegory rather than history. Finally, Marcus Bull, who has worked extensively on issues of crusading and narrative, will offer a comment on the previous papers.