Calling Holy War in Boston: A Virtual Talk with Thomas Lecaque

It is easy to act like crusading is a medieval phenomenon that we evolve past—after all, when we picture the Crusades, we see knights in shining armor dying in the dry heat on their way to Jerusalem, an activity that surely we gave up before we began the process of colonizing America. And yet, the Crusades officially last until 1798, when Napoleon takes Malta, and Benjamin Franklin—whose baptismal records are at the Congregational Library & Archives—was ten when the last individual crusade was called.

Even more shocking, crusading does not remain a Catholic endeavor. For all that puritan preachers decry the Crusades as a “Rhomish bastard,” they use the rhetoric of apocalyptic holy war against their Catholic foes to the North (the French) across almost a century of imperial conflicts.

In this talk, CLA Research Fellow Dr. Thomas Lecaque will look at the ways that rhetoric of holy war spills across sermons, diaries, letters, and marginal notations in books, and forms an important and little studied aspect of the way European wars are translated onto the American frontier.

Email any questions to programs@14beacon.org.

SPEAKER BIO

Dr. Thomas Lecaque is Associate Professor of History at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa, where he teaches medieval world history, vast early American history, and game studies. A recipient of the American Congregational Association - Boston Athenaeum Fellowship and the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, he is currently working on a book project entitled "Holy War Rhetoric in Colonial America, 1680-1765."