medieval politics (mostly religious)

Divided into 1) big picture history, 2) church and European state formation, 3) war and European state formation, 4) political economy, 5) church reforms, 6) European marriage pattern, 7) tolerance and convivencia, 8) conversion and Christianization, 9) Jews under Christian rule, 10) Jews and Christians under Muslim rule, 11) diplomatic and intellectual exchange, 12)  inter-faith translations, 13) crusades, 14) heresies and persecuting society, 14) Muslims and Spain after Reconquista, 15) race and religion. 

Big picture historical context

• Rosenwein, Barbara H. 2018. A Short History of the Middle Ages. University of Toronto Press.

• Anderson, Perry. 1996. Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. Verso.

• Cohen, Mark R. 2021. Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages. Princeton University Press.

• Oakley, Francis. 1985. The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages. Cornell University Press.

• Moore, Robert I. 2000. The First European Revolution: 970-1215. Wiley.

• Bulliet, Richard W. 1979. Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History. Harvard University Press.

Church and European State Formation

• Mesquita, Bruce Bueno de. 2022. The Invention of Power: Popes, Kings, and the Birth of the West. PublicAffairs.

• Møller, Jørgen. 2018. “The Ecclesiastical Roots of Representation and Consent.” Perspectives on Politics 16(4): 1075–84. 

• Møller, Jørgen. 2021. “Medieval Origins of the European State System: The Catholic Church as Midwife.” International Studies Review 23(3): 914–32. 

• Møller, Jørgen, and Jonathan Stavnskær Doucette. 2022. The Catholic Church and European State Formation, AD 1000-1500. Oxford University Press.

• Grzymala-Busse, Anna. 2020. “Beyond War and Contracts: The Medieval and Religious Roots of the European State.” Annual Review of Political Science 23(1): 19–36.

• Grzymala-Busse, Anna. 2024. “How the Popes Helped Luther: Territorial Fragmentation and the Diffusion of Protestant Ideology.” Journal of Historical Political Economy 4(1): 1–32. 

• Grzymała-Busse, Anna M. 2023. Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State. Princeton University Press.

• Doucette, Jonathan. 2021. “The Diffusion of Urban Medieval Representation: The Dominican Order as an Engine of Regime Change.” Perspectives on Politics 19(3): 723–38. 

• Bueno De Mesquita, Bruce, and Ethan Bueno De Mesquita. 2023. “From Investiture to Worms: European Development and the Rise of Political Authority.” The Journal of Politics 85(3): 876–91.

• Blaydes, Lisa, and Christopher Paik. 2016. “The Impact of Holy Land Crusades on State Formation: War Mobilization, Trade Integration, and Political Development in Medieval Europe.” International Organization 70(3): 551–86. 

• Strayer, Joseph Reese. 1973. On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State. Princeton University Press.

War and European State Formation

• Tilly, Charles. 1993. Coercion, Capital and European States: AD 990 - 1992. Wiley.

• Blaydes, Lisa, and Eric Chaney. 2013. “The Feudal Revolution and Europe’s Rise: Political Divergence of the Christian West and the Muslim World before 1500 CE.” American Political Science Review 107(1): 16–34.

• Dincecco, Mark, and Massimiliano Gaetano Onorato. 2016. “Military Conflict and the Rise of Urban Europe.” Journal of Economic Growth 21(3): 259–82. 

• Greif, Avner, and Jared Rubin. 2024. “Endogenous Political Legitimacy: The Tudor Roots of England’s Constitutional Governance.” The Journal of Economic History 84(3): 655–89. 

• Scheidel, Walter. 2019. Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity. Princeton University Press. 

• Kokkonen, Andrej, Jørgen Møller, and Anders Sundell. 2022. The Politics of Succession: Forging Stable Monarchies in Europe, AD 1000-1800. Oxford University Press.

Political Economy

• Mitterauer, Michael. 2010. Why Europe?: The Medieval Origins of Its Special Path. University of Chicago Press.

• Clark, James G. 2021. The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History. Yale University Press.

• Barker, Hannah. 2019. That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500. University of Pennsylvania Press.

• Blaydes, Lisa, and Christopher Paik. 2021a. “Muslim Trade and City Growth Before the Nineteenth Century: Comparative Urbanization in Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia.” British Journal of Political Science 51(2): 845–68. 

• Blaydes, Lisa, and Christopher Paik. 2021b. “Trade and Political Fragmentation on the Silk Roads: The Economic Effects of Historical Exchange between China and the Muslim East.” American Journal of Political Science 65(1): 115–32.

• Chaney, Eric, and Richard Hornbeck. 2016. “Economic Dynamics in the Malthusian Era: Evidence from the 1609 Spanish Expulsion of the Moriscos.” The Economic Journal 126(594): 1404–40. 

• Dennison, Tracy K., and Sheilagh Ogilvie. 2016. “Institutions, Demography, and Economic Growth.” The Journal of Economic History 76(1): 205–17. 

• Heldring, Leander, James A Robinson, and Sebastian Vollmer. 2021. “The Long-Run Impact of the Dissolution of the English Monasteries*.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 136(4): 2093–2145.

Church Reforms

• Howe, John. 2016. Before the Gregorian Reform: The Latin Church at the Turn of the First Millennium. Cornell University Press.

• Southern, R. W. 1990. Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages. Penguin Publishing Group.

• Doucette, Jonathan Stavnskær, and Jørgen Møller. 2021. “The Collapse of State Power, the Cluniac Reform Movement, and the Origins of Urban Self-Government in Medieval Europe.” International Organization 75(1): 204–23. 

European Marriage Pattern

• Hajnal, John. 1982. “Two Kinds of Preindustrial Household Formation System.” Population and Development Review 8(3): 449–94. 

• De Moor, Tine, and Jan Luiten Van Zanden. 2010. “Girl Power: The European Marriage Pattern and Labour Markets in the North Sea Region in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period.” The Economic History Review 63(1): 1–33. 

• Schulz, Jonathan F., Duman Bahrami-Rad, Jonathan P. Beauchamp, and Joseph Henrich. 2019. “The Church, Intensive Kinship, and Global Psychological Variation.” Science 366(6466): eaau5141. 

• Dennison, Tracy, and Sheilagh Ogilvie. 2014. “Does the European Marriage Pattern Explain Economic Growth?” The Journal of Economic History 74(3): 651–93. 

• Bennett, Judith M. 2019. “Wretched Girls, Wretched Boys and the European Marriage Pattern in England (c. 1250–1350).” Continuity and Change 34(3): 315–47.

• Aktürk, Şener. 2020. “Comparative Politics of Exclusion in Europe and the Americas: Religious, Sectarian, and Racial Boundary Making since the Reformation.” Comparative Politics 52(4): 695–719. 

• Aktürk, Şener. 2024. “Not So Innocent: Clerics, Monarchs, and the Ethnoreligious Cleansing of Western Europe.” International Security 48(4): 87–136.

• Donahue, Jr., Charles. 2008. Law, Marriage, and Society in the Later Middle Ages: Arguments about Marriage in Five Courts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Tolerance and Convivencia

• Nederman, Cary J. 2000. Worlds of Difference: European Discourses of Toleration, C. 1100-c. 1550. Pennsylvania State University Press.

• Bejczy, Istvan. 1997. “Tolerantia: A Medieval Concept.” Journal of the History of Ideas 58(3): 365–84.

• Nirenberg, David. 2008. “Islam and the West: Two Dialectical Fantasies.” Journal of Religion in Europe 1(1): 3–33. 

• Holsinger, Bruce. 2008. “Empire, Apocalypse, and the 9/11 Premodern.” Critical Inquiry 34(3): 468–90. 

• Menocal, Maria Rosa. 2014. The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. Back Bay Books / Little, Brown.

  • Novikoff, Alex. 2005. “Between Tolerance and Intolerance in Medieval Spain: An Historiographic Enigma.” Medieval Encounters 11(1–2): 7–36. 

  • Soifer, Maya. 2009. “Beyond Convivencia : Critical Reflections on the Historiography of Interfaith Relations in Christian Spain.” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 1(1): 19–35. 

  • See selections in Cohen: Under Crescent and Cross

Conversion and Christianization

• Constable, Olivia Remie, and Damian Zurro. 2012. Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources. University of Pennsylvania Press.

• Bartlett, Robert. 1985. “The Conversion of a Pagan Society in the Middle Ages.” History 70(229): 185–201.

  • Original Texts: Life of Saint Martin of Tours by Sulpicius Severus and Acts of the Apostles

• Stofferahn, Steven. 2009. “Staying the Royal Sword: Alcuin and the Conversion Dilemma in Early Medieval Europe.” The Historian 71(3): 461–80. 

• The Life and Afterlife of St. Elizabeth of Hungary: Testimony from Her Canonization Hearings. 2010. Oxford University Press.

• Vesteinsson, Orri. 2000. The Christianization of Iceland: Priests, Power, and Social Change 1000-1300. OUP Oxford.

• Kling, David W. 2020. A History of Christian Conversion. Oxford University Press.

• Muldoon, James, ed. 1997. Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages. First Edition. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

• Harrison, Alwyn. 2012. “Behind the Curve: Bulliet and Conversion to Islam in al-Andalus Revisited.” Al-Masāq 24(1): 35–51. 

Jews Under Christian Rule

• Stocking, Rachel L. 2008. “Early Medieval Christian Identity and Anti‐Judaism: The Case of the Visigothic Kingdom.” Religion Compass 2(4): 642–58. 

• Berend, Nora. 2001. At the Gate of Christendom: Jews, Muslims and “Pagans” in Medieval Hungary, C.1000 - C.1300. Cambridge University Press.

• Cole, Peter. 2009. The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492. Princeton University Press.

• Elukin, Jonathan. 2013. Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages. Princeton University Press.

• Andersen, Thomas Barnebeck, Jeanet Bentzen, Carl-Johan Dalgaard, and Paul Sharp. 2017. “Pre-Reformation Roots of the Protestant Ethic.” The Economic Journal 127(604): 1756–93.

• Epstein, Marc Michael. 2011. The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative, and Religious Imagination. Yale University Press.

Christians and Jews under Muslim Rule: the Dhimmi Experience

• Clarke, Nicola. 2012. The Muslim Conquest of Iberia: Medieval Arabic Narratives. Routledge.

• See selections from Routledge Handbook of Muslim Iberia (2020). 

  • Original text: Eulogies on the Martyrs of Córdoba

  • Original text: see Cole (2009) above on Hebrew poetry.

• Safran, Janina M. 2013. Defining Boundaries in Al-Andalus: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Islamic Iberia. Cornell University Press.

• Safran, JM. 2001. “Identity and Differentiation in Ninth-Century al-Andalus.” Speculum 76(3): 573–98. 

• Wolf, Kenneth Baxter. 1984. Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain: Eulogius of Cordoba and the Making of a Martyr’s Movement. Stanford University.

• Wolf, Kenneth Baxter. 1999. Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain. Liverpool University Press.

• Kogman-Appel, Katrin. 2002. “Hebrew Manuscript Painting in Late Medieval Spain: Signs of a Culture in Transition.” The Art Bulletin 84(2): 246–72. 

Diplomatic and Intellectual Exchanges

• Cobb, Paul M. 2021. “Coronidis Loco: On the Meaning of Elephants, from Baghdad to Aachen.” In Interfaith Relationships and Perceptions of the Other in the Medieval Mediterranean, Mediterranean Perspectives, eds. Sarah Davis-Secord, Belen Vicens, and Robin Vose. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 49–77. 

• Glick, TF. 2004. “The Life and Afterlife of St. Elizabeth of Hungary: Testimony from Her Canonization Hearings.” In Jews, Muslims and Christians In and Around the Crown of Aragon, Leiden: Brill, 157–82.

• Constable, Olivia Remie. 2003. Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press.

Translations

• Read Embrico of Mainz, Life of Muhammad (warning: prejudiced)

• Burman, Thomas E. 1998. “Tafsīr and Translation: Traditional Arabic Qurʾān Exegesis and the Latin Qurʾāns of Robert of Ketton and Mark of Toledo.” Speculum 73(3): 703–32.

• Tolan, John Victor. 2013. Sons of Ishmael: Muslims Through European Eyes in the Middle Ages. University Press of Florida.

• Resnick, Irven. 2018. “Peter the Venerable on the Talmud, the Jews, and Islam.” Medieval Encounters 24(5–6): 510–29.

Crusades: Let's go beyond Karen Armstrong

• Akbari, Suzanne. 1998. “Imagining Islam: The Role of Images in Medieval Depictions of Muslims.” Scripta Mediterranea 19–20.

• MacEvitt, Christopher. 2010. The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance. University of Pennsylvania Press.

  • Peter the Venerable, Writings Against the Saracens

  • Pope Urban II, Speech at Council of Clermont (1095)

• Hoffman, Eva R. 2004. “Christian-Islamic Encounters on Thirteenth-Century Ayyubid Metalwork: Local Culture, Authenticity, and Memory.” Gesta 43(2): 129–42.

Heresies and the Persecuting Society? 

• Moore, R. I., and Robert Ian Moore. 1990. The Formation Of A Persecuting Society: Power And Deviance In Western Europe, 950-1250. Wiley.

  • Read Siete Partidas of Alfonso X, on Muslims and Jews 

  • Read Canons of the Fourth Lateran Council 

• Lipton, Sara. 2016. “Isaac and Antichrist in the Archives *.” Past & Present 232(1): 3–44.

• Tartakoff, Paola. 2018. “From Conversion to Ritual Murder: Re-Contextualizing the Circumcision Charge.” Medieval Encounters 24(4): 361–89.

• Freidenreich, David. 2007. “Sharing Meals with Non-Christians in Canon Law Commentaries, Circa 1160-1260: A Case Study in Legal Development.” Medieval Encounters 14(1): 41–77.

Muslims and Spain after the Reconquista

• Constable, Olivia Remie. 2018. To Live Like a Moor: Christian Perceptions of Muslim Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain. University of Pennsylvania Press.

• Dodds, Jerrilynn Denise, Maria Rosa Menocal, and Abigail Krasner Balbale. 2008. The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture. Yale University Press.

• Fuchs, Barbara. 2011. Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Race and Religion

• Nirenberg, David. 2014. “Was There Race before Modernity? The Example of ‘Jewish’ Blood in Late Medieval Spain.” In Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today, ed. David Nirenberg. University of Chicago Press.

• Pearce, S. J. 2020. “The Inquisitor and the Moseret: The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages and the New English Colonialism in Jewish Historiography.” Medieval Encounters 26(2): 145–90.

• Heng, Geraldine. 2018. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press.

• Henrich, Joseph. 2020. The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

• Cole, Richard. 2014. “One or Several Jews? The Jewish Massed Body in Old Norse Literature.” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 5(3): 346–58.