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The book argues that religion is a system of significant meanings that have an impact on other systems and spheres of social life, including cultural memory. The editors call for a postsecular turn in memory studies which would provide a more reflective and meaningful approach to the constant interplay between the religious and the secular. This opens up new perspectives on the intersection of memory and religion and helps memory scholars become more aware of the religious roots of the language they are using in their studies of memory. By drawing on examples from different parts of the world, the contributors to this volume explain how the interactions between the religious and the secular ...
Tsar Ivan the Terrible (Ivan IV, 1533-1584) is one of the most controversial rulers in Russian history, infamous for his cruelty. He was the first Russian ruler to use mass terror as a political instrument, and the only Russian ruler to do so before Stalin. Comparisons of Ivan to Stalin only exacerbated the politicization of his image. Russians have never agreed on his role in Russian history, but his reign is too important to ignore. Since the abolition of censorship in 1991 professional historians and amateurs have grappled with this problem. Some authors have manipulated that image to serve political and cultural agendas. This book explores Russia’s contradictory historical memory of Ivan in scholarly, pedagogical and political publications.
Intimate Empire tells the story of the Mansurovs, a small noble family who played a momentous role in the Russian Empire, as they struggled to reassert the countries importance on the global stage after their defeat in the Crimean War, showing how three generations of a family advanced the intertwined causes of the Russian Empire and Orthodoxy.
The crusading movement endured well beyond the 14th century. Across Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, the desire for crusading continued to wield substantial influence, transcending borders and permeating diverse social strata. This companion brings together pertinent research and organizes a field of study that has become solidified recently. It focuses on crusading activities, rhetoric, discourses, and symbols that left lasting impacts and had global consequences for both Christian and Muslim societies. With contributions from Marian Coman, André Teixeira, António Lázaro, Pavel Soukoup, Emir O. Filipović, Ferenc Toth, Ana Echevarría, Elma Koric, Ignacio Bernstorff, Iulian Damian, Benjamin Weber, Nikolay Antov, Heribert Müller, Magnus Ressel, Paul Srodecki, Stefan Schröder, James Mixson, Eleni Tounta, Iván Rega Castro, Borja Franco Llopis, Loïc Chollet, Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas, Antonio García Espada, Norman Housley
Religious Horror and Holy War in Viking Age Francia explores how authorities in western Francia used horror rhetoric to cast Christian soldiers, who robbed the poor and the church, as monsters that devoured human flesh and drank human blood. Adapting modern literary horror approaches to medieval sources, this study reveals how such rhetoric served as a form of spiritual weaponry in the clergy's attempts to correct and condemn wayward military men. This investigation, therefore, unearths long-forgotten Carolingian thought about the dreadful spiritual reality of internal enemies during a time of political division and the Northmens depredations. Yet such horror also informed a new understanding of Christian heroism that developed in relation to the wars fought against the invaders. This vision of heroic soldiers, which included military martyrs, culminated in ideas about holy war against the pagans. Thus Carolingian religious horror and holy war together belonged to a body of ideas about the spiritual, unseen side of the church's cosmic conflict against evil that foreshadowed later medieval Crusading thought.
This book explores the sacralization of history with a focus on modern Eastern Europe where the erasure of Soviet traditions has triggered a search for specific "usable pasts". It discusses the importance of sacralization in memory and identity-building politics and the complex interplay between religion, history, and identity, particularly within the context of crises and conflict situations, by showing the historical roots of these processes. The contributors seek to identify the political, societal and religious actors promoting the sacralization of history. They consider which networks promote sacralized visions of history and who is excluded from the sacralized community of national belonging. They also explore which historical topics seem best suited for the sacralization of history and question what happens to the rituals, objects, or spaces, formerly regarded as sacral: are they profaned, neglected, or re-inscribed by new national histories, and is there a religious language of national history? These are the major questions of this book.
This volume concentrates on the "conceptual boundary" through Europe which is determined by Western and Eastern Christianity. The single articles research how this boundary has developed in different periods and epochs and in different places. They also show that the boundary has never been a stable and defined division, but that it was also subject to change and development and a place of encounter and exchange between religions and cultures.
The “bulwark” or antemurale myth—whereby a region is imagined as a defensive barrier against a dangerous Other—has been a persistent strand in the development of Eastern European nationalisms. While historical studies of the topic have typically focused on clashes and overlaps between sociocultural and religious formations, Rampart Nations delves deeper to uncover the mutual transfers and multi-sided national and interconfessional conflicts that helped to spread bulwark myths through Europe’s eastern periphery over several centuries. Ranging from art history to theology to political science, this volume offers new ways of understanding the political, social, and religious forces that continue to shape identity in Eastern Europe.
Elaborate icons and murals of the Last Judgment adorned many Eastern-rite churches in medieval and early modern Ukraine. The largest compilation of its kind, The World to Come includes more than eighty such images from present-day Ukraine, eastern Slovakia, and southeastern Poland, with most printed in full color.
After the epochal turn of 1989 a new wave of movies dealing with the complex entanglement of religious and national identity has emerged in the eastern part of Europe. There has been plenty of evidence for a return of nationalism, while the predicated "return of religion(s)" is envisaged on a larger scale as a global phenomenon. The book suggests that in the wake of the historical turns of 1989, an "iconic turn" has taken place in Eastern Europe – in the form of a renewed cinematic commitment to make sense of the world in religious and/or national terms. "Iconic Turns" combines theoretical articles on the subject with case studies, bringing together researchers from different national backgrounds and disciplines, such as history, literary and film studies. Contributors include: Eva Binder, Jan Čulík, Liliya Berezhnaya, Christian Schmitt, Hans-Joachim Schlegel, Maren Röger, Mirosław Przylipiak, Stephen Norris, John-Paul Himka, Maria Falina, and Natascha Drubek.