Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology
Throughout the history of the Crusades, liturgical prayer, masses, and alms were all marshaled in the fight against Muslim armies. In Invisible Weapons, M. Cecilia Gaposchkin focuses on the ways in which Latin Christians communicated their ideas and aspirations for crusade to God through liturgy, how public worship was deployed, and how prayers and masses absorbed the ideals and priorities of crusading. Placing religious texts and practices within the larger narrative of crusading, Gaposchkin offers a new understanding of a crucial facet in the culture of holy war.
Open Access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities
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Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology
Throughout the history of the Crusades, liturgical prayer, masses, and alms were all marshaled in the fight against Muslim armies. In Invisible Weapons, M. Cecilia Gaposchkin focuses on the ways in which Latin Christians communicated their ideas and aspirations for crusade to God through liturgy, how public worship was deployed, and how prayers and masses absorbed the ideals and priorities of crusading. Placing religious texts and practices within the larger narrative of crusading, Gaposchkin offers a new understanding of a crucial facet in the culture of holy war.
Open Access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities
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Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology
Throughout the history of the Crusades, liturgical prayer, masses, and alms were all marshaled in the fight against Muslim armies. In Invisible Weapons, M. Cecilia Gaposchkin focuses on the ways in which Latin Christians communicated their ideas and aspirations for crusade to God through liturgy, how public worship was deployed, and how prayers and masses absorbed the ideals and priorities of crusading. Placing religious texts and practices within the larger narrative of crusading, Gaposchkin offers a new understanding of a crucial facet in the culture of holy war.
Open Access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities
M. Cecilia Gaposchkin is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at Dartmouth College. She is the author of The Making of Saint Louis and the coeditor of The Sanctity of Louis IX: Early Lives of Saint Louis by Geoffrey of Beaulieu and William of Chartres.
Table of Contents
IntroductionPreliminariesChapter 1. Liturgy and the Origins of Crusade IdeologyChapter 2. From Pilgrimage to CrusadeChapter 3. On the MarchChapter 4. Celebrating the Capture of Jerusalem in the Holy CityChapter 5. Echoes of Victory in the WestChapter 6. Clamoring to God: Liturgy as a Weapon of WarChapter 7. Praying against the TurksConclusion
What People are Saying About This
Jonathan Phillips
In 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.
Jay Rubenstein
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.
Philippe Buc
This 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.
Christopher Tyerman
With 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.
Christoph T. Maier
M. 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.