Violence in Medieval Europe (The Medieval World) by Warren C. Brown

Author:Warren C. Brown [Brown, Warren C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317866206
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-06-11T04:00:00+00:00

Conclusions

Thietmar has left us a text that is the product of his own biases and purposes. It is a polemic supporting the rights and interests of his diocese of Merseburg. It is a history charting the political fortunes of his family. And it is a warning to secular powers, especially to the king, of their duty to uphold and protect the rights and interests of the bishops, especially the Saxon bishops. In short, it is a text that was not a passive report of events, but rather one that was intended to impact the very political world that it describes.

We can safely assume that Thietmar’s stories, and the normative frameworks in which he packaged them, were at least plausible to his contemporaries, even if some of those contemporaries might not have agreed with how he cast them. Thietmar refers explicitly or implicitly to normative frameworks that either did govern people’s behavior in his world, or that he thought should have governed people’s behavior, and that therefore were viable elements of his world’s mental and normative landscape. At the same time, his stories were, to some degree at least, limited by the living memories of those in a position to read or hear the text; he was not entirely free, especially in his later books, to construct his stories at will. We can, therefore, reconstruct normative frameworks that competed with Thietmar’s preferred ones by looking closely at what he says happened. This task is made much easier by the fact that Thietmar did not always try to hide motivations of which he did not approve. In several cases, Thietmar freely admits why his characters behaved as they did, even when he did not agree with their motives. On occasion, Thietmar admits that he did not understand why someone was (or some saints were) violent. Yet he always tries to come up with an explanation. His attempts to do so reveal still more about his sense of both the possible and the dominant norms that governed his contemporaries’ behavior.

Thietmar gives us plenty of evidence for ritualized violence. Quite a number of violent conflicts in his chronicle end up following the contours of what Althoff has called the deditio, that is, a staged, public, and symbolic surrender followed by a merciful forgiveness. The pattern appears in Thietmar’s text often enough, and is regular enough, to qualify as ritual. The sense of the ritual in these affairs is reinforced by Thietmar’s accounts of behind the scenes negotiation and advance planning, and especially by his accounts of magnate criticism when kings chose not to act as they thought he should. The violence that formed part of the ritual, such as seizing a girl and barricading oneself in a castle, or damaging a castle in a significant but repairable fashion, communicated symbolically one’s readiness to use violence to assert or defend one’s rights and honor. It reminded one’s opponents of the latent threat of real, dangerous violence that made settlement preferable.

This blending of violence with ritual

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.