Or, as she puts it elsewhere: ‘Text after text suggests that it would be inaccurate to envision a heavy ideological dividing line separating a pro-vengeance laity from an anti-vengeance Church’ (p. ‘The concept of crusading as vengeance’, she declares, ‘was no anomaly, and crusading was conceived as an act of vengeance not only through the application of ‘secular’ values, but also through values inherent in twelfth-century Christianity’ (p. Throop takes issue with this interpretation of the evidence.
(1) Erdmann, followed by other scholars including Riley-Smith, Peter Partner, Jean Flori and others, associated this ‘immature’ idea squarely with the laity, part of their ‘feudal’ notions of honor, shame, and military obligation. Along the way, she makes a number of intriguing observations about the nature of religious violence and the place of crusading within medieval Christian ‘mytho-history’, suggesting some of the wider possibilities raised by her close reading of the vocabulary of vengeance and related terms.Īs noted by Throop, Carl Erdman, in his highly influential 1935 work The Origin of the Idea of Crusading, judged the idea of crusading as an act of vengeance to be ‘an obvious improvisation suggestive of how immature the idea of crusading still was’. Throop, to the contrary, declares that an interpretation of crusading as vengeance inhabited a vital place in the clerical as well as the lay imaginations, and that far from fading over the course of the 12th and early 13th centuries, the notion occupied an increasingly prominent place in crusade histories, chansons de geste, letters, poems, and other sources. In this book, based on her University of Cambridge dissertation, Throop seeks to dislodge the widely accepted position among crusade historians (in part, due to the magisterial work of her former advisor, Jonathan Riley-Smith) that the idea of crusading as an act of vengeance represented a largely secular phenomenon, developing among the ‘rude’ laity, one that peaked around the time of the First Crusade only to disappear as later generations of clerical authors refined the theology of crusading. Throop in Crusading as an Act of Vengeance, viewed the biblical notion of the Lord’s vengeance with deadly earnestness and interpreted their own actions through the ‘vocabulary of vengeance’.
‘I am the Lord thy God, mighty, jealous, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me: And showing mercy unto thousands to them that love me, and keep my commandments’ (Ex.
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