Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire recounts the history of an exceptional ninth-century religious outlaw, Gottschalk of Orbais. Frankish Christianity required obedience to ecclesiastical superiors, voluntary participation in reform, and the belief that salvation was possible for all baptized believers. Yet Gottschalk-a mere priest-developed a controversial, Augustinian-based theology of predestination, claiming that only divine election through grace enabled eternal life. Gottschalk preached to Christians within the Frankish empire-including bishops-and non-Christians beyond its borders, scandalously demanding they confess his doctrine or be revealed as wicked reprobates. Even after his condemnations for heresy in the late 840s, Gottschalk continued his activities from prison thanks to monks who smuggled his pamphlets to a subterranean community of supporters. This study reconstructs the career of the Carolingian Empire's foremost religious dissenter in order to imagine that empire from the perspective of someone who worked to subvert its most fundamental beliefs. Examining the surviving evidence (including his own writings), Matthew Gillis analyzes Gottschalk's literary and spiritual self-representations, his modes of argument, his prophetic claims to martyrdom and miraculous powers, and his shocking defiance to bishops as strategies for influencing contemporaries in changing political circumstances. In the larger history of medieval heresy and dissent, Gottschalk's case reveals how the Carolingian Empire preserved order within the church through coercive reform. The hierarchy compelled Christians to accept correction of perceived sins and errors, while punishing as sources of spiritual corruption those rare dissenters who resisted its authority.

The study of the conflict between religious orthodoxy and heresy in the Middle Ages has long been a controversial field. Though the sectarian differences of the past have faded in intensity, the varieties of academic correctness that today inform historical studies are quite likely to give rise to a number of interpretations, sometimes providing more information about the sympathies of contemporary historians than the beliefs, feelings, and actions of Medieval people. In this book, Jeffrey Burton Russell provides a fresh overview of the subject from the Council of Chalcedon (451 A.D.) to the eve of the Protestant Reformation. The fruit of many years of thought and scholarship, Dissent and Order in the Middle Ages is a concise introduction to the full range of religious and social phenomena encompassed by the book's title. While tracing the intellectual battles that raged between the champions of orthodoxy and the partisans of dissent, Russell grounds these conflicts, which often seem rather recondite to the modern reader, in the evolving social context of Medieval Europe. In addition to discussing conflicts within Christianity, Russell sheds new light on such vexing topics as the origin of antisemitism and the persecution of alleged witches. More than just an overview, Russell's study is also an original interpretation of a complex subject. Russell sees the conflict between dissent and order not as a war of binary opposites, but rather as an ongoing dialectic, a "creative tension" that, despite the excesses it entailed on both sides, was essential to the development of Christianity. Without this creative tension, Russell argues, Christianity might well have stagnated and possibly died.Dissent and order, then, are perhaps best seen as symbiotically joined aspects of a single living, healthy organism. Dissent and Order in the Middle Ages will appeal to, and challenge, all readers interested in European history, from beginning students to seasoned scholars, as well as those concerned with Christianity's past--and future.

Re-evaluates the political integration and Christianization of Saxony following its violent conquest (772-804) by Charlemagne.

Traces the political development of the Carolingian Spanish March and revises traditional interpretations of Catalonia's political and constitutional history.

Emotions in a Crusading Context is the first book-length study of the emotional rhetoric of crusading. It investigates the ways in which a number of emotions and affective displays-primarily fear, anger, and weeping-were understood, represented, and utilised in twelfth- and thirteenth-century western narratives of the crusades, making use of a broad range of comparative material to gauge the distinctiveness of those texts: crusader letters, papal encyclicals, model sermons, chansons de geste, lyrics, and an array of theological and philosophical treatises. In addition to charting continuities and changes over time in the emotional landscape of crusading, this study identifies the underlying influences which shaped how medieval authors represented and used emotions; analyzes the passions crusade participants were expected to embrace and reject; and assesses whether the idea of crusading created a profoundly new set of attitudes towards emotions. Emotions in a Crusading Context calls on scholars of the crusades to reject the traditional methodological approach of taking the emotional descriptions embedded within historical narratives as straightforward reflections of protagonists' lived feelings, and in so doing challenges the long historiographical tradition of reconstructing participants' beliefs and experiences from these texts. Within the history of emotions, Stephen J. Spencer demonstrates that, despite the ongoing drive to develop new methodologies for studying the emotional standards of the past, typified by experiments in 'neurohistory', the social constructionist (or cultural-historical) approach still has much to offer the historian of medieval emotions.