Summarizes a number of essays published or delivered during the 1980s and 1990s investigating the reasons for conflict in the Middle Ages and the mechanisms by which it was contained. The purpose is to elucidate approaches that could be of use in the modern world. Among the topics are peace campaigns of the church and the state, the movement from private justice to public law and from private combat to rules of war, alternatives to the peace campaigns, and the pacification of Europe. Over 100 pages are devoted to annotated bibliographic material of interest both to medievalists and peace scholars. Paper edition (unseen), $13.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A Cultural History of Peace presents an authoritative survey from ancient times to the present. The set of six volumes covers over 2500 years of history, charting the evolving nature and role of peace throughout history. This volume, A Cultural History of Peace in the Medieval Age explores peace from 800 to 1450. As with all the volumes in the illustrated Cultural History of Peace set, this volume presents essays on the meaning of peace, peace movements, maintaining peace, peace in relation to gender, religion and war and representations of peace. A Cultural History of Peace in the Medieval Age is the most authoritative and comprehensive survey available on peace in the medieval era.

A Cultural History of Peace presents an authoritative survey from ancient times to the present. The set of six volumes covers over 2500 years of history, charting the evolving nature and role of peace throughout history. This volume, A Cultural History of Peace in the Renaissance, explores peace in the period from 1450 to 1648. As with all the volumes in the illustrated Cultural History of Peace set, this volume presents essays on the meaning of peace, peace movements, maintaining peace, peace in relation to gender, religion and war and representations of peace. A Cultural History of Peace in the Renaissance is the most authoritative and comprehensive survey available on peace in the early modern era.

In a companion volume to Pacifism in the United States, Peter Brock surveys the history of the pacifist movement in Europe from the beginning of the Christian era to the First World War. His detailed narrative is directed to the activities—and the beliefs that motivated them—of these sects in particular: the Czech Brethren of the late Middle Ages; the radical Anabaptists of the Protestant Reformation; their less militant offshoot, the Mennonites; the Quakers of Cromwell's England; and the Tolstoyans of nineteenth-century Russia. Mr. Brock concludes his account with a working definition of normative pacifism, a typology of pacifism, and a discussion of the factors present in the genesis and decay of pacifist groups. Originally published in 1972. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In The Sleep of Behemoth, Jehangir Yezdi Malegam explores the emergence of conflicting concepts of peace in western Europe during the High Middle Ages. Ever since the Early Church, Christian thinkers had conceived of their peace separate from the peace of the world, guarded by the sacraments and shared only grudgingly with powers and principalities. To kingdoms and communities they had allowed attenuated versions of this peace, modes of accommodation and domination that had tranquility as the goal. After 1000, reformers in the papal curia and monks and canons in the intellectual circles of northern France began to reimagine the Church as an engine of true peace, whose task it was eventually to absorb all peoples through progressive acts of revolutionary peacemaking. Peace as they envisioned it became a mandate for reform through conflict, coercion, and insurrection. And the pursuit of mere tranquility appeared dangerous, and even diabolical. As Malegam shows, within western Christendom's major centers of intellectual activity and political thought, the clergy competed over the meaning and monopolization of the term "peace." contrasting it with what one canon lawyer called the "sleep of Behemoth," a diabolical "false" peace of lassitude and complacency, one that produced unsuitable forms of community and friendship that must be overturned at all costs. Out of this contest over the meaning and ownership of true peace, Malegam concludes, medieval thinkers developed theologies that shaped secular political theory in the later Middle Ages. The Sleep of Behemoth traces this radical experiment in redefining the meaning of peace from the papal courts of Rome and the schools of Laon, Liege, and Paris to its gradual spread across the continent and its impact on such developments as the rise of papal monarchism; the growth of urban, communal self-government; and the emergence of secular and mystical scholasticism.