Description
Book SynopsisExploring the emergence of conflicting concepts of peace in western Europe during the High Middle Ages.
Trade ReviewThe 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 was 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 *
Table of ContentsIntroduction1. Revising Peace: Reform and the Millennium2. The Papal Reform: Peace Espoused and Repudiated3. False Sacraments: Violence, Captivity, and Insurrection4. Dueling Sacraments: The Communion of Judas Iscariot5. Inner Peace: Discord, Discretion, and Discipline6. Exporting Peace: Ecclesiology and Evangelism7. Communes: Inversions of Peace8. Disciplining Behemoth: Provisions for Secular PeaceEpilogueBibliography
Index
