The Sleep of Behemoth

Disputing Peace and Violence in Medieval Europe, 1000-1200

Bibliographic Data

ID7874658
AuthorsTakashi Shogimen (0000-0001-7354-6299, University of Otago, corresponding author)
Year2015
Volume57
Issue1
Pages179-181
Publication date2015-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Church and State (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-969X • E-ISSN: 2040-4867
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jcs/csu119
OpenAlexW2141345621
LanguageEN
Citations received6

The late J. H. Burns wrote in 1988: “The character of ‘medieval political thought’ is problematic. Its very existence, as an identifiable entity or subject, may be questioned, and has been denied” (“Introduction,” in Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988], 1). Historians of medieval political thought cannot presuppose that their object of inquiry is something like the ancient Greek polis or the modern state. Their main task is therefore to illuminate the historical process by which distinctly “political” ways of thinking emerged in medieval writings, which are often ostensibly social, economic, ecclesiastical, or spiritual. The counsel that Burns offered to overcome this difficulty was to explore the discourses on authority and jurisdiction in those texts. This has indeed been the approach that many experts deployed successfully to excavate political thinking in their examinations of later medieval writings. Jehangir Yezdi Malegam's book exemplifies a brilliant account of the process of the making of medieval political thinking. But his investigation deploys a fresh outlook; it tackles the idea of peace in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. While peace is ubiquitous in medieval texts, historians of political thought rarely paid serious attention to it, perhaps with notable exceptions of Harald Fuch's 1965 study of the Augustinian idea of peace and Matthew Kempshall's 1999 work on the idea of the common good in the late Middle Ages. Dealing with the period 1000–1200 is also challenging. Indeed, while much ink has been spilt on the Peace of God Movement and the Investiture Controversy, the reconceptualization of the idea of peace in those contexts has not been identified and explored so clearly and thoroughly. Malegam's book uncovers that, in the first two centuries of the second millennium, competing conceptions of peace emerged: one is false peace, the peace that means lassitude, tranquility, and subjugation, which the twelfth-century canonist Rufinus of Sorrento called the “sleep of Behemoth.” The other is true peace: the papal reformist vision of peace that is anchored in a perpetual covenant with God. Harmonious relationships between humans constitute an inauthentic peace; real peace only exists in the horizontal relationship between God and human, represented by the true sacramenta of the church. Such a vision of true peace turned churchmen of a reformist predisposition into “soldiers” who did not hesitate to have recourse to armed forces. Ostensible tranquility is now seen to be inherently violent and precarious. The Gregorian reformers and their successors thus became peacemakers who appealed to violent means in order to bring about true peace. Malegam's analysis deftly moves across a wide range of primary sources from biographies and chronicles to theological writings, thus highlighting the emergence of “theologies of peace” which articulated competing conceptions.

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Art · Eleventh · Jurisdiction · Literature · Middle Ages · Object (grammar) · Period (music) · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · Subject (documents) · Byzantine Studies and History · Classics · Eurasian Exchange Networks · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy

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