Preaching and knighthood in the process of expansion of Latin Christendom: The role of the Ramon Llull’s Orde de la Milícia

Abstract

This article re-examines the role played by Ramon Llull in the history of preaching in the Western Middle Ages taking into consideration the new approaches in sermon studies and politics. Also under discussion is the Llull’s project to create a new unified military Order whose purpose is to support the preaching and the conversion of the infidel according to the ecclesiastical task of the Christian knighthood. The study of the Lullian’ efforts to converting Muslims into Christian faith demands an accurate methodology since it can be related to alterity, violence and intolerance. In light of this, any dissociation between discourse and its enunciators will be avoided, certain that violence originates in social relations, not in transhistorical collective mentality detached from a specific space-time situation. The Lullian works are apologetic and polemical, therefore, they cannot be taken by a neutral account of a supposed intolerant or persecutory culture, characteristic of an anarchic medieval era, but rather, they are records, that is, mediations by which a certain rhetoric can be mobilized to defend the interests of certain individuals subjects in detriment of others; it is a power game in which some subjects self-legitimize themselves as they seek to delegitimize others.