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The region called Livonia (corresponding to modern Estonia and Latvia) emerged out of the rapid transformation caused by the conquest, Christianisation and colonisation on the north-east shore of the Baltic Sea in the late twelfth and the early thirteenth centuries. These radical changes have received increasing scholarly notice over the last few decades. However, less attention has been devoted to the interplay between the new and the old structures and actors in a longer perspective. This volume aims to study these interplays and explores the history of Livonia by concentrating on various actors and networks from the late twelfth to the seventeenth century. But, on a deeper level, the goal is more ambitious: to investigate the foundation of an increasingly complex and heterogeneous society on the medieval and early modern Baltic frontier – ‘the making of Livonia’.
At the turn of the 20th century, the township of Livonia was largely a rural community populated with farms, dirt roads, and several cheese factories. A few decades later, as the auto industry boomed in Detroit, white-collar workers sought places to raise their families outside the city, and Livonia changed seemingly overnight. What was once considered a backwater berg was suddenly seen with different eyes through the lens of the quintessential American suburban city, one in which urban and rural lifestyles converged and formed a new kind of community. This book celebrates Livonia's development from the 19th to 21st century, as it evolved from wilderness into a city that is routinely rated as one of the best places to raise a family in the United States.
This monograph by Anti Selart is the first comprehensive study available in English on the relations between northern crusaders and Rus'. Selart re-examines the central issues of this crucial period of establishing the medieval relations of the Catholic and Orthodox worlds like the Battle on the Ice (1242) and the role of Alexander Nevsky using the relevant source material of both “sides”. He also considers the wide context of the history of crusading and the whole Eastern and Northern Europe from Hungary and Poland to Denmark, Finland, and Sweden in 1180-1330. This monograph contests the existence of the constitutive religious conflict and extensive aggressive strategies in the region – the ideas which had played a central role in modern historiography and ideology.
In Conquest and the Law in Swedish Livonia (ca. 1630-1710), Heikki Pihlajamäki offers an exciting account of the law in seventeenth-century Livonia, conquered by Sweden. The volume demonstrates how the differences in legal cultures affected the Livonian judiciary and legal procedure in the region.
The societies of the lands around the Baltic Sea underwent remarkable changes in the thirteenth century. This book examines aspects of these religious, economical, societal, and institutional innovations, such as the adaption of the Christianity, emergence of urban life, and the development of economic resources.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, an intellectual discourse developed in Livonia which shed light on the disastrous social conditions of the indigenous population. This book examines the premise that the resulting "nationalization" of the Latvians occurred in the 1780s and 1790s as a result of a German Enlightenment in Livonia. It investigates the role that eighteenth-century anthropological, ethnographical, historical, and cultural ideas played in this process of "nationalizing" the Latvians, and focuses on the development of the arguments for agrarian and social change by proponents of reform in Livonia at this time. The work investigates the historical structures and processes...