Invisible Weapons

Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology

By: M. Cecilia Gaposchkin

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Paperback | 1 March 2021

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378 Pages

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18+

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15.2 x 22.8 x 2.7

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In 1098, three years into the First Crusade and after a brutal eight-month siege, the Franks captured the city of Antioch. Two days later, Muslim forces arrived with a relief army, and the victors became the besieged. Exhausted and ravaged by illness and hunger, the Franks were exhorted by their religious leaders to supplicate God, and for three days they performed a series of liturgical exercises, beseeching God through ritual prayer to forgive their sins and grant them victory. The following day, the Christian army, accompanied by bishops and priests reciting psalms and hymns, marched out of the city to face the Muslim forces and won a resounding and improbable victory.

From the very beginning and throughout the history of the Crusades, liturgical prayer, masses, and alms were all marshaled in the fight against the Muslim armies. During the Fifth Crusade, Pope Honorius III likened liturgy to "invisible weapons." This book is about those invisible weapons; about the prayers and liturgical rituals that were part of the battle for the faith. M. Cecilia Gaposchkin tells the story of the greatest collective religious undertaking of the Middle Ages, putting front and center the ways in which Latin Christians communicated their ideas and aspirations for crusade to God through liturgy, how liturgy was deployed in crusading, and how liturgy absorbed ideals or priorities of crusading. Liturgy helped construct the devotional ideology of the crusading project, endowing war with religious meaning, placing crusading ideals at the heart of Christian identity, and embedding crusading warfare squarely into the eschatological economy. By connecting medieval liturgical books with the larger narrative of crusading, Gaposchkin allows us to understand a crucial facet in the culture of holy war.

Industry Reviews

Gaposchkin delivers her argument not only with historical exactitude and ingenuity, but also with the care of a seasoned educator.... Gaposchkin's work stands at the top of crusade studies. Her work will strengthen the syllabi of seminars dedicated to liturgical history, especially of the medieval and crusading periods, and associated reading lists for doctoral students.

* Homiletic *

The intricate web linking thought, expression, and action at the heart of this marvelous book [will surely make it] indispensable for anyone interested in the Crusades as a manifestation of medieval religious culture.

* American Historical Review *

A model demonstration of how the liturgy promoted ecclesiastical goals, and how the technical, seemingly intractable, medieval liturgy can be made accessible to historians.... Comprehensive, convincing, and successful.

* H-France Review *

This illuminating and detailed book reveals an aspect of crusading that is too easily forgotten-the practice of prayer and its dynamic relationship with the practice of arms-and urges us to remember that medieval Latin Christians were as serious about their faith as they were about their warfare.

* Reading Religion *

This is a hardworking and exciting piece of work... that makes an original and impressive contribution to scholarship on the crusades.

* The Medieval Review *

In this exceptionally learned, well-written, and important monograph, Gaposchkin makes a singular contribution to not one but two fields: liturgical studies and crusades history.... This is a monumental work deserving the attention of every medievalist.

* Church History *

Invisible Weapons is one of the most important books on the crusades to be published in recent decades. Like the very best scholarship in the field, it deepens our understanding of the crusades and the ideology that fuelled them, but situates the whole phenomenon within the wider cultural context of the medieval West, revealing ultimately how 'the liturgy imbibed the ideals of crusade such that crusade ideals and aspirations became part of Christian identity'

* Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies *

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