Geoffrey Koziol – författare

In reconstructing and interpreting rituals of supplication, Geoffrey Koziol here uncovers the dense meanings of these most common-place of all early medieval rituals. The author casts a wide net, comparing these rituals in several regions of northern and western France to illuminate the complex changes in social relations and political power in the tenth and eleventh centuries.In medieval cultures, "supplication" was simply the act of prayer, an act that required a distinctive language of entreaty accompanied gestures of humility, such as kneeling and prostration. Koziol shows that in tenth- and eleventh-century France, prayer was an act of political honor as well as religious devotion, since the language and gestures of prayer were used to address not only God but also earthly lords who claimed to rule "by the grace of God." Making subtle use of ethnological studies and using a remarkable range of sources, Koziol demonstrates that supplication accurately reflected the complexities and paradoxes in contemporary attitudes toward friendship, enmity, and political authority. And in documenting their regional variations, he shows that the rituals of supplication, far from being routinized gestures insensitive to context, remained culturally meaningful by adapting to the realities of different political and social communities. Original and richly interdisciplinary, Begging Pardon and Favor is a major contribution to our understanding of medieval political and religious culture.

In reconstructing and interpreting rituals of supplication, Geoffrey Koziol here uncovers the dense meanings of these most common-place of all early medieval rituals. The author casts a wide net, comparing these rituals in several regions of northern and western France to illuminate the complex changes in social relations and political power in the tenth and eleventh centuries.In medieval cultures, "supplication" was simply the act of prayer, an act that required a distinctive language of entreaty accompanied gestures of humility, such as kneeling and prostration. Koziol shows that in tenth- and eleventh-century France, prayer was an act of political honor as well as religious devotion, since the language and gestures of prayer were used to address not only God but also earthly lords who claimed to rule "by the grace of God." Making subtle use of ethnological studies and using a remarkable range of sources, Koziol demonstrates that supplication accurately reflected the complexities and paradoxes in contemporary attitudes toward friendship, enmity, and political authority. And in documenting their regional variations, he shows that the rituals of supplication, far from being routinized gestures insensitive to context, remained culturally meaningful by adapting to the realities of different political and social communities. Original and richly interdisciplinary, Begging Pardon and Favor is a major contribution to our understanding of medieval political and religious culture.

The Peace of God was one of the most important, and one of the most contested, movements of the entire Middle Ages. It has been seen as either radically innovative or fundamentally traditional; as strongly millenarian or not millenarian at all; as the first great popular movement in European history or as an instrument by which elites consolidated their power. In this book, Geoffrey Koziol argues that all such differing viewpoints have some basis in fact, partly because specific instantiations of the Peace of God varied greatly, but also because from its very beginning the movement brought to the fore the contradictions inherent in earlier ideas and rituals of peace and peace-making.