Features
- Cover Type: Hard Cover with 392 pages
- Published by: Cornell University Press January 2003
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0801437083
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0801437083
-
Book Dimensions:
9.3 x 6.2 x 1.5 inches
- Weighs: 2 pounds
Book Description
Order and Exclusion is a rare and awesome book of medieval history with clear relevance to today's headlines. Through the lens of the polemics of Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, Dominique Iogna-Prat looks at the process by which christianity transformed itself into Christendom, a powerful spiritual, social, and political system with pretensions to universality.
Iogna-Prat's close examination of a set of writings central to the history of Catholicism resolves into a deeply troubling study of the origins of attitudes that continue to shape world events. Iogna-Prat writes that "versions of fundamentalism nourished by the soil of an often terrible common history" show that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have all been capable of intolerance.
Peter the Venerable's writings had a far-reaching impact: the powerful network of Clunaic houses expanded from the founding of the original monastery of Cluny to dominate Christendom by the twelfth century. This Christendom, Iogna-Prat demonstrates, defined itself in part through its increasingly bitter struggles against its perceived enemies both within and without. Peter the Venerable's all-pervasive logic pitted the "order" of the monastery and its hierarchical society against all those-heretics, Jews, Muslims, lepers-outside its bounds. In his proclamations against Jews and Muslims, Peter devised a Christian anthropology: in his view, to be non-Christian was to be non-human. The power of the Church came at a great and lasting price.
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French
Reader Reviews
A previous "review" entitled "History or Propaganda?" should not have been posted. The writer of this "review" admits in his last paragraph that he has not even read the book! This reminds me of Bill Murray's review of films on Saturday Night Live. Murray would concede that he had not actually viewed the movies under consideration (but at least he made this admission UP FRONT!). I am going to purchase "Order and Exclusion." And though I have not read it yet, I am going to give it five stars anyway, because I did read a rave review of it in the August 10, 2003 LA Times Book Review. And that review was offered by a Yale University professor of religion.
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