Invisible Weapons

"""M. Cecilia Gaposchkin's new book represents the cutting edge of modern crusade studies. It establishes liturgy as a defining force of medieval crusading, its practice, and its ideology.""-Christoph T. Maier, University of Zurich, author of Crusade Propaganda and Ideology ""With alert, exact, meticulous scholarship on an impressively rich array of primary sources, M. Cecilia Gaposchkin reveals the precise liturgical frame behind the origins, shape, and development of crusade ideology across four centuries. This fresh, lucid, compelling, and accessible analysis of complex evidence provides a comprehensive study of how crusading was imagined within the context of wider Christian worship and religious culture. Gaposchkin's forensic study of how ideas on holy war were articulated in regular devotional observance offers access more generally to the public operation of medieval mentalities. Anyone with an interest in crusader studies or in the relationship of formal religious practice with the aspirations of popular faith will benefit from engaging with this significant contribution.""-Christopher Tyerman, University of Oxford, author of How to Plan a Crusade ""In this tremendously engaging and important book, M. Cecilia Gaposchkin deftly reveals the centrality of liturgical ideas and practices to the crusading movement. In clear and convincing style she takes us through the evolution of crusading ideology and then links developments in liturgical texts and practices with the broader narrative of crusading history. In her accessible and impressive use of these often-neglected materials, she convincingly demonstrates how these 'invisible weapons' formed yet another dimension of crusading's impact on the people of western Europe.""-Jonathan Phillips, Royal Holloway, University of London, author of Holy Warriors ""This is a fundamental book. Building on Amnon Linder's pioneering studies, M. Cecilia Gaposchkin reveals with clarity of pen the importance of the Latin Christian liturgy for the crusades. Liturgy provided key notions to warriors even before the First Crusade; it was adapted regionally to the vagaries in time and place of holy war, this over the centuries, all the way to the Ottoman expansion. It expressed and spread, in alternating waves, apocalyptic hopes, disappointments, the mandate of reform and purification. Critically, the book makes clear how the liturgy transmitted to European culture at large clerical notions of Sacred History, divine will, vengeance, penance, and necessary reform, and so made the crusade a total cultural form, impacting and involving all Western and Central Europeans.""-Philippe Buc, Institut fur Geschichte, Universitat Wien, author of Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror ""In Invisible Weapons, M. Cecilia Gaposchkin draws together two highly technical, specialized fields-crusades studies and liturgical studies. Her use of unpublished manuscript materials provides a great service to students of the crusade. For liturgists, Invisible Weapons will prove to be similarly useful and provocative, casting light on how church ceremonies evolved and adapted to specific historical circumstances.""-Jay Rubenstein, University of Tennessee-Knoxville, author of Armies of Heaven"