Wir laden herzlich zum öffentlichen englischsprachigen Montagsvortrag unserer Außenstelle Vilnius ein:
Paul Srodecki:
Crusading on the Frontiers of Latin Christendom. Key Research Issues and Debates
If a survey were to be held today to find out what is meant by a crusade, the answer which would probably be given most frequently is that it refers to the wars of the Latin Christians of the high Middle Ages in the Holy Land. The extent to which this traditional depiction is still widespread among the general public is shown by countless popular or rather pseudo-scientific publications on the subject (whether in print or as TV productions), which reduce the crusade phenomenon of the Middle Ages solely to the conflict ‘between Orient and Occident’. However, for medieval contemporaries, the term crusade (or better: the various Latin crusading terms such as cruciata, expeditio, iter, via, peregrinatio, profectio or passagium, as well as their respective national language equivalents), had a much broader range than the description of the military campaigns for the protection or rather the reconquest of Christianity’s sacred sites in the Holy Land. Using the crusade as justification, the popes also legitimised numerous armed endeavours outside the Levant. With only a few exceptions, the latter campaigns only received limited attention in Western studies from the beginning of modern historiography in the nineteenth until well into the twentieth centuries. Ranging in scope from the Baltic Sea region to the Balkans and Iberia, in this lecture be presented the crusading and crusade movement on the edges of Latin Christendom.
Paul Srodecki is a historian who has been working as an assistant and visiting professor, research fellow and lecturer at the universities of Giessen, Kiel and Flensburg (all three Germany), Ostrava (Czechia), Poznań (Poland) and Sønderborg (Denmark). He has published several treatises on alterity and alienity discourses, crusading on the frontiers of Latin Christendom as well as historical deconstruction and mnemonic culture with a special focus on East-Central and Eastern Europe.
The lecture will be held in English language.
The lecture will be streamed on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQyaW8QFHp5GxuGDWnvy2nQ
