Between Sword and Prayer

Between Sword and Prayer is a broad-ranging anthology focused on the involvement of medieval clergy in warfare and a variety of related military activities. The essays address, on the one hand, the issue of clerical participation in combat, in organizing military campaigns, and in armed defense, and on the other, questions surrounding the political, ideological, or religious legitimization of clerical military aggression. These perspectives are further enriched by chapters dealing with the problem of the textual representation of clergy who actively participated in military affairs. The essays in this volume span Latin Christendom, encompassing geographically the four corners of medieval Europe: Western, East-Central, Northern Europe, and the Mediterranean.Contributors are Carlos de Ayala Martínez, Geneviève Bührer-Thierry, Chris Dennis, Pablo Dorronzoro Ramírez, Lawrence G. Duggan, Daniel Gerrard, Robert Houghton, Carsten Selch Jensen, Radosław Kotecki, Jacek Maciejewski, Ivan Majnarić, Monika Michalska, Michael Edward Moore, Craig M. Nakashian, John S. Ott, Katherine Allen Smith, and Anna Waśko.

''The question of militant or arms-bearing clergy remained for many decades the preserve of scholars focused on the German kingdom and, to a lesser extent, the Carolingian Empire. The last few years, however, have seen the publication of a spate of books that have examined militant clergy in other contexts. [...] The volume under review here, which includes essays by both Nakashian and Gerrard, continues the process of broadening the historical investigation of clergy who were involved in the conduct of war. [...] This volume provides a valuable array of perspectives on the problem of clerical militancy across much of Europe over a period of many centuries.One of the prominent themes that emerges from these studies is the great complexity and diversity of Christian thought regarding whether and when it was licit for clerics to shed blood directly, or to participate in other ways in military campaigns David S. Bachrach, in Speculum, 94/2 (2019). "In their edited volume, Radosław Kotecki, Jacek Maciejewski, and John S. Ott deserve congratulations for bringing together such a broad sample of scholarship on the subject of the involvement of medieval clerics in military affairs; those congratulations need at least be double for the authors of the chapters for taking the time to do new and important work rooted in research, rather than succumb to the pressure of doing empirically-suspect but popularly-facing trendy writing. The volume’s contents are considerable and make a clear case that, whatever the legal or social impacts might be, clerics were involved in the processes of warfighting broadly across Medieval Latin Christendom; this is itself is an achievement, made all the more impressive by the detail of the individual chapters […] Kotecki, Maciejewski, and Ott deserve considerable thanks for their work to collect so many quality scholars, and Brill deserve praise for putting these chapters together in one volume''. Kyle Lincoln, in De Re Militari, August 2020.

Radosław Kotecki, Ph.D. (2013), Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland, is Adjunct at that university. He has published essays on medieval church and cultural history, and is co-editor of several volumes, including Ecclesia et Violentia (Cambridge Scholars, 2014).Jacek Maciejewski, Ph.D. (1996), is full Professor at Kazimierz Wielki University, Poland. He has published extensively on the Polish medieval episcopacy. He is the author of three monographs, including Episkopat polski doby dzielnicowej, 1180-1320 (Societas Vistulana, 2003), and Adventus episcopi (UKW, 2013)John S. Ott, Ph.D. (1999), Stanford University, is Professor of History at Portland State University. He is co-editor of The Bishop Reformed (Ashgate, 2007), and the author of Bishops, Authority and Community in Northwestern Europe, c.1050-1150 (Cambridge University Press, 2015).