Wojtek Jezierski

What anxieties did medieval missionaries and crusaders face and what role did the sense of risk play in their community-building? To what extent did crusaders and Christian colonists empathize with the local populations they set out to conquer? Who were the hosts and who were the guests during the confrontations with the pagan societies on the Baltic Rim? And how were the uncertainties of the conversion process addressed in concrete encounters and in the accounts of Christian authors? This book explores emotional bonding as well as practices and discourses of hospitality as uncertain means of evangelization, interaction, and socialization across cultural divides on the Baltic Rim, c. 1000-1300. It focuses on interactions between local populations and missionary communities, as well as crusader frontier societies. By applying tools of historical anthropology to the study of host-guest relations, spaces of hospitality, emotional communities, and empathy on the fronts of Christianization, this book offers fresh insights and approaches to the manner in which missionaries and crusaders reflexively engaged with the groups targeted by Christianization in terms of practice, ethics, and identity.

Att använda teori är en viktig del av historievetenskaperna. Med hjälp av teori kan en analys fördjupas och de empiriska resultaten göras greppbara i ett vidare sammanhang. För den som ska skriva en uppsats kan dock arbetet med teori framstå som abstrakt. Hur kan teorier bidra till historiska undersökningar? Hur arbetar man med teori – i praktiken? Det är temat i denna bok. Bokens kapitel tar avstamp i elva olika materialkategorier som är vanliga i historievetenskapliga arbeten. Med utgångspunkt i dessa material diskuteras källmaterialens förutsättningar och hur de kan användas i vetenskapliga arbeten med fokus på olika teoretiska perspektiv och begrepp. Ett genomgående tema är att teorier ska förstås som verktyg i den historiska forskningsprocessen och att valet av teori hänger tätt samman med källmaterial, metod och problemformulering. Teori i historisk praktik vänder sig till studerande i historievetenskapliga ämnen vid universitet och högskolor. Den är särskilt lämplig för dig som söker redskap för att få din uppsats att lyfta.

Can we think of a Benedictine cloister around the year 1000 as reminiscent of a modern prison or a mental asylum? Was the monastery a medieval type of Erving Goffman's 'total institution' or Benthanian panopticon thoroughly structuring the thoughts and practices of its inmates? What did the power relations between the groups of monks in medieval St Gall look like? Wojtek Jezierski's thesis explores and expands the connection between the medieval forms of monastic life and modern social theories. It investigates the patterns of persecution and exclusion, the exercise of power and surveillance, as well as violent conflicts between the conventuals and their abbots. It analyzes also the social components of monastic habitus and subjectivity in the monasteries of St Gall, Fulda, Bury St Edmunds and others. Finally, the study examines the strategies monks used to cope with the demands made on them by the external lay world, i.e. the political, social, and cultural liaisons between claustrum and saeculum. Wojtek Jezierski (b. 1979) studied history and social anthropology the University of Warsaw. He conducts research at the Department of History and the centre for Medieval Studies, Stockholm University. This book is his PhD thesis.