Mission, conversion & baptism
More general subjects:
Through Words, Not Wounds
History and Theology in the Chronicle of Henry of Livonia
The chronicle of Henry of Livonia has long been recognized as the single most important source on the early history of Livonia and Estonia in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.
The chronicler describes in great detail how the people of the region were subjected to intense campaigns of crusading and mission from the 1180s until the 1220s primarily at the hands of ecclesiastical and secular powers of Northern Germany (Saxony) Denmark and Sweden. The chronicler himself a German cleric named Henry (Henricus) was not only active in recording the events that happened around him. He also took a very active role as a missionary and interpreter among the indigenous population as well as joining the armies of crusaders on campaign making this chronicle both a first-hand account and a very intriguing narrative. Papal missionary politics and theological ideas are intermingled in the chronicle with detailed descriptions of military campaigns raids and sieges making the entire chronicle a fascinating read.
The aim of this book is to clarify the ways in which Henry construes the historical events that he describes portraying them as the continuation of a form of sacred history that was initiated by God in biblical times and continued by clerics and crusaders among Henry’s own peers.
Xanthippe et Polyxène
Un roman chrétien
Ce petit roman chrétien composé en grec vraisemblablement autour du v e siècle et manifestement influencé par les Actes apocryphes des apôtres se compose de deux parties chacune centrée sur une femme. L’héroïne du premier récit Xanthippe épouse d’un notable est tournée vers l’ascèse et bien que païenne aspire à connaître le Dieu de Paul. Or il se trouve que l’apôtre se rend en Espagne dans sa ville. Surmontant plusieurs épreuves avec détermination et faisant preuve d’un remarquable discernement spirituel la chaste Xanthippe est baptisée par Paul et contribue à la conversion de son mari. Polyxène sa jeune sœur est l’héroïne du second récit fort différent qui se présente comme un véritable roman d’aventures et de voyages. Victime d’un enlèvement et emmenée en Grèce elle voit sa virginité maintes fois menacée. Mais elle bénéficie de plusieurs aides efficaces dont celles des apôtres Pierre Philippe et André. Elle s’en retourne saine et sauve dans sa ville d’Espagne pour rester désormais attachée à l’apôtre Paul. L’ensemble de ce roman présente la particularité de fournir l’unique récit conservé des faits et gestes de Paul en Espagne.
The Church and Cistercians in Medieval Poland
Foundations, Documents, People
In this volume the research of Józef Dobosz one of Poland’s leading historians of the Middle Ages is made accessible in English for the first time. It brings together nineteen studies focused on the role of the Church the Cistercian Order and other religious institutions in the history of the Piast realm from which Poland emerged. The introduction offers a broad outline of the first two centuries of the rule of the Piast dynasty after the Baptism of Poland in 966 until the fragmentation of the Piast patrimony during the twelfth century. The subsequent essays examine the circumstances of the foundation of Poland’s leading Cistercian monasteries in Sulejów Jędrzejów Wąchock Owińska and Łekno. The author analyses the means of their establishment evaluates the existing sources and places these within the context of the Piast dynasty’s economic political and social policies.
The studies offer an in-depth analysis of the motivations of the leading dynasts magnates and prelates in supporting the mission of the Church in Poland and enabling further embedding of Christianity across all strata of the society. The author examines the oldest Polish documents related to Cistercian monasteries and canons regular (in particular foundation charters) including early medieval charter forgeries. The volume’s key conclusions about the impact of Christianity on nascent Poland are based on a detailed examination of medieval charters the role of scriptoria identities of significant people of the Church and the wider historical record.
Risk, Emotions, and Hospitality in the Christianization of the Baltic Rim, 1000–1300
What anxieties did medieval missionaries and crusaders face and what role did the sense of risk play in their community-building? To what extent did crusaders and Christian colonists empathize with the local populations they set out to conquer? Who were the hosts and who were the guests during the confrontations with the pagan societies on the Baltic Rim? And how were the uncertainties of the conversion process addressed in concrete encounters and in the accounts of Christian authors?
This book explores emotional bonding as well as practices and discourses of hospitality as uncertain means of evangelization interaction and socialization across cultural divides on the Baltic Rim c. 1000-1300. It focuses on interactions between local populations and missionary communities as well as crusader frontier societies. By applying tools of historical anthropology to the study of host-guest relations spaces of hospitality emotional communities and empathy on the fronts of Christianization this book offers fresh insights and approaches to the manner in which missionaries and crusaders reflexively engaged with the groups targeted by Christianization in terms of practice ethics and identity.
Means of Christian Conversion in Late Antiquity
Objects, Bodies, and Rituals
This volume presents the proceedings of the conference Materiality and Conversion: The Role of Material and Visual Cultures in the Christianization of the Latin West organized by the Centre for Early Medieval Studies in 2020. Its contributions thus focus on the Christianization of the Roman Empire between the fourth and sixth centuries. The studies examine the religious change through the “material turn” approach building on the material and sensorial dimension of Christian conversion and especially the baptismal rite as one of the key components of the process. The material and visual cultures are regarded as vectors and witnesses of conversion to Christianity while human body is viewed as one of the agents in ritual actions. The volume covers a wide range of topics including the prebaptismal purification the moment of immersion in the baptismal font the postbaptismal alteration of perception as well as the continuous changes in funeral forms. As such the papers attempt to shed more light on the role of materiality in the complex and rapid conversion to Christianity in Late Antique West.
Theatres of Belief: Music and Conversion in the Early Modern City
These eleven essays all centrally concerned with the intimate relationship between sound religion and society in the early modern world present a sequence of test cases located in a wide variety of urban environments in Europe and the Americas. Written by an international cast of acclaimed historians and musicologists they explore in depth the interrelated notions of conversion and confessionalisation in the shared belief that the early modern city was neither socially static nor religiously uniform. With its examples drawn from the Holy Roman Empire and the Southern Netherlands the pluri-religious Mediterranean and the colonial Americas both North and South this book takes discussion of the urban soundscape so often discussed in purely traditional terms of European institutional histories to a new level of engagement with the concept of a totally immersive acoustic environment as conceptualised by R. Murray Schafer. From the Protestants of Douai a bastion of the Catholic Reformation to the bi-confessional city of Augsburg and seventeenth-century Farmington in Connecticut where the indigenous Indian population fashioned a separate Christian entity the intertwined religious musical and emotional lives of specifically grounded communities of early modern men and women are here vividly brought to life.