What anxieties did medieval missionaries and crusaders face and what role did the sense of risk play in their community-building? To what extent did crusaders and Christian colonists empathize with the local populations they set out to conquer? Who were the hosts and who were the guests during the confrontations with the pagan societies on the Baltic Rim? And how were the uncertainties of the conversion process addressed in concrete encounters and in the accounts of Christian authors? This book explores emotional bonding as well as practices and discourses of hospitality as uncertain means of evangelization, interaction, and socialization across cultural divides on the Baltic Rim, c. 1000-1300. It focuses on interactions between local populations and missionary communities, as well as crusader frontier societies. By applying tools of historical anthropology to the study of host-guest relations, spaces of hospitality, emotional communities, and empathy on the fronts of Christianization, this book offers fresh insights and approaches to the manner in which missionaries and crusaders reflexively engaged with the groups targeted by Christianization in terms of practice, ethics, and identity.
Author(s): Wojtek Jezierski
Series: Early European Research, 17
Publisher: Brepols
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 356
City: Turnhout
Preface
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Baltic Frontier Societies, Peripheral Visions, and Emotional Palimpsests
Chapter 3. Fear in Missionary and Crusader Risk Societies, Tenth–Thirteenth Centuries
Chapter 4. Pagan Hosts, Missionary Guests, Spaces of Hospitality, Tenth–Twelfth Centuries
Chapter 5. Hospitality and Its Discontents inHelmold of Bosau’s Chronica Slavorum,Twelfth Century
Chapter 6. Emotional Bonding and Trust during Sieges, Twelfth–Thirteenth Centuries
Chapter 7. Politics of Emotions and Empathy Walls in Livonia, Thirteenth Century
Chapter 8. Hospitality and the Formation of Identities in the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle, Thirteenth Century
Chapter 9. Epilogue
Bibliography
General Index
Early European Research
