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Christianity changed the culture and society of Iceland, as it also did in other parts of Northern Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. One of the important areas of change involved the introduction of new rules on the legal requirements for marriage. Property and Virginity examines Icelandic law codes, marriage contracts, and other documents related to court proceedings. Based on extensive source material never researched before, this pioneer study explores the very gradual Christianization of marriage in Iceland. It shows that this process, which lasted for hundreds of years, had consequences for family and kinship politics, for inheritance and property transfer, and for gen...
Due to the scarcity of sources regarding actual Jewish and Muslim communities and settlements, there has until now been little work on either the perception of or encounters with Muslims and Jews in medieval Scandinavia and the Baltic Region. The volume provides the reader with the possibility to appreciate and understand the complexity of Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations in the medieval North. The contributions cover topics such as cultural and economic exchange between Christians and members of other religions; evidence of actual Jews and Muslims in the Baltic Rim; images and stereotypes of the Other. The volume thus presents a previously neglected field of research that will help nuance the overall picture of interreligious relations in medieval Europe.
This ground-breaking study of the role of crusading in late-medieval and early modern Denmark argues that crusading had a tremendous impact on political and religious life in Scandinavia all through the Middle Ages, which continued long after the Reformation ostensibly should have put an end to its viability within Protestant Denmark.
In Frontiers for Peace in the Medieval North. The Norwegian-Scottish Frontier c. 1260-1470, Ian Peter Grohse examines social and political interactions in Orkney, a Norwegian-held province with long and intimate ties to the Scottish mainland. Commonly portrayed as the epicentre of political tension between Norwegian and Scottish fronts, Orkney appears here as a medium for diplomacy between monarchies and as an avenue for interface and cooperation between neighbouring communities. Removed from the national heartlands of Scandinavia and Britain, Orcadians fostered a distinctly local identity that, although rooted in Norwegian law and civic organization, featured a unique cultural accent engendered through Scottish immigration. This study of Orcadian experiences encourages greater appreciation of the peaceful dimensions of pre-modern European frontiers.
As the first monk in the desert, Antony became an early Christian superstar, eclipsing his many ascetic predecessors. The introduction of asceticism into the wilderness also represented an encounter between Christian and Hellenistic ideas. For centuries Greeks had considered the uncultivated geography intrinsically primordial, a chaotic place where man struggled to remain human. The wilderness represented an eternal ordeal, where man always faced fierce beasts, disorder, and death, but also where simultaneously he could attain boundless wealth, wisdom, and even physical immortality. Through Athanasius of Alexandria's fourth-century biography of Antony, we learn how the Christian appropriatio...
Bringing alive the dramatic poems of Old Norse heroic legend, this new collection offers accessible, ground-breaking and inspiring essays which introduce and analyse the exciting legends of the two doomed Helgis and their valkyrie lovers; the dragon-slayer Sigurðr; Brynhildr the implacable shield-maiden; tragic Guðrún and her children; Attila the Hun (from a Norse perspective!); and greedy King Fróði, whose name lives on in Tolkien’s Frodo. The book provides a comprehensive introduction to the poems for students, taking a number of fresh, theoretically-sophisticated and productive approaches to the poetry and its characters. Contributors bring to bear insights generated by comparative...
Iron Age Myth and Materiality: an Archaeology of Scandinavia AD 400-1000 considers the relationship between myth and materiality in Scandinavia from the beginning of the post-Roman era and the European Migrations up until the coming of Christianity. It pursues an interdisciplinary interpretation of text and material culture and examines how the documentation of an oral past relates to its material embodiment. While the material evidence is from the Iron Age, most Old Norse texts were written down in the thirteenth century or even later. With a time lag of 300 to 900 years from the archaeological evidence, the textual material has until recently been ruled out as a usable source for any study...
Argues for new models of reading the complexity and subversiveness of fourteen "post-classical" sagas. The late Sagas of Icelanders, thought to be written in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, have hitherto received little scholarly attention. Previous generations of critics have unfavourably compared them to "classical" Íslendingasögur and fornaldarsögur, leading modern audiences to project their expectations onto narratives that do not adhere to simple taxonomies and preconceived notions of genre. As "rogues" within the canon, they challenge the established notions of what makes an Íslendingasaga. Based on a critical appraisal of conceptualisations of canon and genre in saga liter...
With the aim to write the history of Christianity in Scandinavia with Jerusalem as a lens, this book investigates the image – or rather the imagination – of Jerusalem in the religious, political, and artistic cultures of Scandinavia through most of the second millennium. Jerusalem is conceived as a code to Christian cultures in Scandinavia. The first volume is dealing with the different notions of Jerusalem in the Middle Ages. Tracing the Jerusalem Code in three volumes Volume 1: The Holy City Christian Cultures in Medieval Scandinavia (ca. 1100–1536) Volume 2: The Chosen People Christian Cultures in Early Modern Scandinavia (1536–ca. 1750) Volume 3: The Promised Land Christian Cultures in Modern Scandinavia (ca. 1750–ca. 1920)