MEMS is delighted to welcome Prof. William Chester Jordan to give this year’s Anselm lecture: ‘1096: Killing as Retribution, Defiance and Atonement’ on Tuesday 7th November 2017 at 6pm in Grimond Building, Lecture Theatre 2.
Abstract of the lecture
There are many earlier examples of the elevation of acts of lethal violence to a sanctifying status. As this lecture attempts to demonstrate, however, the year 1096 was remarkable for how many people of widely different backgrounds contributed to and came to accept the appropriateness of this conceptual shift. What were the circumstances of the transformation? What justifications were alleged? What were the long-term consequences. Building on the superb work of many other scholars, this lecture aims to further the discussion.
Speaker biography
William Chester Jordan is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History and Chairman of the History Department at Princeton University. He is also a former Director of the Program in Medieval Studies at Princeton. Prof. Jordan has studied and published on the Crusades, English constitutional history, gender, economics, Judaism, and, most recently, church-state relations in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.