On April 27, Matthew Gillis, associate professor of history at UT, will give a public talk titled, “Medieval Holy War before the Crusades.”

In this installment of Conversations & Cocktails, Matthew Bryan Gillis will discuss the tradition of warfare in Europe from the end of Roman rule up to the First Crusade. Focusing especially on France, he’ll consider how Christians traditionally saw war as a religious experience throughout this era. Yet this tradition took on new meaning during the era of the Viking attacks, when Christians invented a crusading-like view of holy war for defending their land against the pagans centuries before the first crusaders marched to Jerusalem in 1096 CE.

About the speaker:

Matthew Bryan Gillis is an associate professor in the History Department at UT. He is the author of Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) and Religious Horror and Holy War in Viking Age Francia (Budapest: Trivent Publishing, 2021). Gillis also edited Carolingian Experiments (Turnhout: Brepols Publishing, 2022), and he is the series editor for Renovatio – Studies in the Carolingian World (Trivent Publishing).

About the series:

Conversations & Cocktails is a free public lecture series hosted by the UT Humanities Center, which showcases the original research of our distinguished University of Tennessee arts and humanities faculty. Our monthly talks give you the opportunity to hear about fascinating and groundbreaking work in the arts and in fields such as philosophy, history, and literary studies. Presentations are 30-40 minutes long and are designed for the general public. A spirited question-and-answer discussion follows each presentation.

If you enjoy this series and would like to support future UT Humanities Center programming, please visit our website to learn about giving opportunities.