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The Sleep of Behemoth: Disputing Peace and Violence in Medieval Europe, 1000–1200
Jehangir Malegam
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Description for The Sleep of Behemoth: Disputing Peace and Violence in Medieval Europe, 1000–1200
Hardback. Num Pages: 352 pages. BIC Classification: 1D; 3H; HBJD; HBLC1. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 233 x 161 x 26. Weight in Grams: 628.
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 ... Read moreChurch 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, Liège, 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.
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Product Details
Publisher
Cornell University Press United States
Place of Publication
Ithaca, United States
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About Jehangir Malegam
Jehangir Yezdi Malegam is Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of History at Duke University.
Reviews for The Sleep of Behemoth: Disputing Peace and Violence in Medieval Europe, 1000–1200
The Peace of Behemoth is a very important book. It leads us into the mental world of church reformers as well as their opponents, and explores ways of understanding peace and violence that are quite different from our own. In the process, it gives us a fresh view of what the ecclesiastical reform movement of the eleventh and twelfth centuries ... Read morewas all about and what drove both its protagonists and opponents to behave in the ways that they did.
Warren C. Brown
The Catholic Historical Review
In his dense and detailed study of a wide range of churchmen like Rufinus, JehangirMalegam proposes to trace the evolution of clerical discourse around peace and to showhow these intellectual experiments with peacemaking "expressed a vision of ecclesiasticalawakening" (3, 6) in the first two centuries of the second millennium.Malegam has many penetrating observations tomake about how contemporary clerics harnessed a symbolically rich and multilayered vocabulary of peace in order to understand, interpret, and even challenge..the societal transformations that were taking place around them.Malegam's book is an undeniably significant contribution to the field of medieval thought.He has mined a great many eleventh- and twelfth-century sources for their intellectual ore,and we should all be grateful for that accomplishment.
Alex J. Novikoff
Speculum
Malegam's The Sleep of Behemoth represents a great service to scholarship on medieval ecclesiastical, political, cultural, and intellectual history, and provides much food for thought on the paradoxical relations between peace and violence, thus giving the book a powerful contemporary relevance.
Takashi Shogimen
Journal of Church and State,
"The theses of The Sleep of Behemoth are fresh and provocative. The book offers a startling new window on medieval theology. Within the limits of the treatises discussed, it is both well argued and persuasive...this is an important and admirable book." —Sharon Dale,Review of Politics In his dense and detailed study of a wide range of churchmen like Rufinus, Jehangir Malegam proposes to trace "the evolution of clerical discourse around peace" and to show how these intellectual experiments with peacemaking "expressed a vision of ecclesiastical awakening" (3, 6) in the first two centuries of the second millennium. Malegam has many penetrating observations tomake about how contemporary clerics harnessed a symbolically rich and multilayered vocabulary of peace in order to understand, interpret, and even challenge...the societal transformations that were taking place around them. Malegam's book is an undeniably significant contribution to the field of medieval thought. He has mined a great many eleventh- and twelfth-century sources for their intellectual ore, and we should all be grateful for that accomplishment.
Alex J. Novikoff
Speculum
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