Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- ARTICLES
- 1 A Lying Legacy? A Preliminary Discussion of Images of Antiquity and Altered Reality in Medieval Military History
- 2 War and Sanctity: Saints' Lives as Sources for Early Medieval Warfare
- 3 The 791 Equine Epidemic and its Impact on Charlemagne's Army
- 4 The Role of the Cavalry in Medieval Warfare
- 5 Sichelgaita of Salerno: Amazon or Trophy Wife?
- 6 Castilian Military Reform under the Reign of Alfonso XI (1312–50)
- 7 Sir Thomas Dagworth in Brittany, 1346–7: Restellou and La Roche Derrien
- 8 Ferrante d'Este's Letters as a Source for Military History
- Appendix: Selected Letters of Ferrante d'Este (Punctuation and accents added)
- NOTE: Provisions for the Ostend Militia on the Defense, August 1436
2 - War and Sanctity: Saints' Lives as Sources for Early Medieval Warfare
from ARTICLES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- ARTICLES
- 1 A Lying Legacy? A Preliminary Discussion of Images of Antiquity and Altered Reality in Medieval Military History
- 2 War and Sanctity: Saints' Lives as Sources for Early Medieval Warfare
- 3 The 791 Equine Epidemic and its Impact on Charlemagne's Army
- 4 The Role of the Cavalry in Medieval Warfare
- 5 Sichelgaita of Salerno: Amazon or Trophy Wife?
- 6 Castilian Military Reform under the Reign of Alfonso XI (1312–50)
- 7 Sir Thomas Dagworth in Brittany, 1346–7: Restellou and La Roche Derrien
- 8 Ferrante d'Este's Letters as a Source for Military History
- Appendix: Selected Letters of Ferrante d'Este (Punctuation and accents added)
- NOTE: Provisions for the Ostend Militia on the Defense, August 1436
Summary
Saints' lives were works of edification that were addressed to all Christians – but they arose from dialogue amongst the clergy themselves and very strongly reflected clerical attitudes. Their authors were usually anonymous. Few of those whose names we know were great intellectuals or men of high importance and from what we can deduce of the vast majority of anonymous writers, they were much the same. The ideas they express, therefore, are likely to be those current among the literate clergy. The lives are, therefore, likely to be representative of the literate “Church” as a whole in a way few other types of literature are. They are often highly conventionalized: written to explain what a saint ought to be rather than to describe an actual life. They are deeply concerned with miracles, reflecting the influence of the famous Life of St. Martin by Sulpicius Severus. But however conventionalized, they reflect contemporary reality, as more and more scholars have come to realize. Ian Wood has recently given us a masterly treatment of a group of such lives to reveal the crisis in Merovingian politics around 675, while Carroll Gillmor has succinctly analysed the Miracula Sancti Germani to demonstrate the movements of Vikings in ninth-century West Francia. They have their traps. Arnulf the Martyr is a soldier accused of disloyalty by his lord; he died in battle against pagans when he gave his horse to his unhorsed lord so that he could flee. He is nominally eighth-century, but I suspect this is a later life.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Journal of Medieval Military History , pp. 14 - 22Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2005