Religious Rites of War Beyond the Medieval West: Northern Europe and the Baltic

This is Volume One of a two-volume collection that brings together contributions from cultural and military history to offer an examination of religious rites employed in connection with warfare as well as their transformative and power- and identity-building potential across political communities of medieval Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe. Covering the period ca. 900 and 1500, the work takes theoretical, textual and practical approaches to the research on religious warfare, and investigates the connections between, and significance and function of crucial war rituals such as pre-, intra- and postbellum rites, as well as various activities surrounding the military life of individuals, polities, and corporates.
Contributors are Robert Antonín, Robert Bubczyk, Dariusz Dąbrowski, Jesse Harrington, Carsten Selch Jensen, Sini Kangas, Radosław Kotecki, Gregory Leighton, Kyle C. Lincoln, Jacek Maciejewski, Yulia Mikhailova, Max Naderer, László Veszprémy, and Dušan Zupka.

Radosław Kotecki, Ph.D. (2013), is an Associate Professor at Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland. He has published on medieval cultural history and religious warfare, and is co-editor of several volumes, including Christianity and War in Medieval Central Europe and Scandinavia (ARC Humanities, 2021).
Jacek Maciejewski, Ph.D. (1996), is full Professor at Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland. He has published on the Polish medieval episcopacy and religious rites. He is the author of three monographs, including Episkopat polski doby dzielnicowej (Societas Vistulana, 2003) and Adventus episcopi (UKW, 2013).
Gregory Leighton, Ph.D. (2018), is a NAWA-Ulam Research Fellow at Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland. He has published on the Teutonic Order, warfare, landscape, and visual and religious culture. He is the author of Holy Landscape and Ideology in the Baltic Crusades (Arc Humanities, 2022).