Miracles, Political Authority and Violence in Medieval and Early Modern History

This volume examines how historical beliefs about the supernatural were used to justify violence, secure political authority or extend toleration in both the medieval and early modern periods.Contributors explore miracles, political authority and violence in Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, various Protestant groups, Judaism, Islam and the local religious beliefs of Pacific Islanders who interacted with Christians. The chapters are geographically expansive, with contributions ranging from confessional conflict in Poland-Lithuania to the conquest of Oceania. They examine various types of conflict such as confessional struggles, conversion attempts, assassination and war, as well as themes including diplomacy, miraculous iconography, toleration, theology and rhetoric. Together, the chapters explore the appropriation of accounts of miraculous violence that are recorded in sacred texts to reveal what partisans claimed God did in conflict, and how they claimed to know. The volume investigates theories of justified warfare, changing beliefs about the supernatural with the advent of modernity and the perceived relationship between human and divine agency.Miracles, Political Authority and Violence in Medieval and Early Modern History is of interest to scholars and students in several fields including religion and violence, political and military history, and theology and the reception of sacred texts in the medieval and early modern world.

About the Author

Matthew Rowley is Honorary Visiting Fellow at the University of Leicester and a historian of early modern religion and violence. Trump and the Protestant Reaction to Make America Great Again (2021) examined how Americans interact with historical racism, sexism and exploitation. He is editing a two-volume Global Sourcbook in Protestant Political Thought, 1517–1914 .

Natasha Hodgson is Director of the Centre for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Nottingham Trent University. She wrote Women, Crusading and the Holy Land (2017) and co-edited Crusading and Masculinities (2019). She is series editor for Themes in Medieval and Early Modern History and Advances in Crusader Studies and co-edits Nottingham Medieval Studies.