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This book examines the representation and historical significance of the legendary Scandinavian past as it is depicted in two late medieval Icelandic saga manuscripts: AM 589a–f 4to and AM 586 4to. It situates the manuscripts within their literary, media, and historical contexts to read the legendary sagas (or fornaldarsögur) within them as works of historical writing. The qualities about them that are often used to deny them the label of ‘history ́ — their proximity to romance and ‘folklore’, and their playfully self-conscious narration — are reinterpreted as conscious attempts to reconfigure cultural memory to suit the needs of the manuscripts’ fifteenth-century patrons. Th...
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From Rus' to Rímur, volume 65 in the Islandica series and simultaneously an issue in the occasional journal New Norse Studies, offers six contributions that range across Europe from East to West and across three categories: "Historical Studies," "Literary Studies," and "New Editions." The volume opens with a historical-onomastic study of the Varangian presence in Medieval Rus' and proceeds to the Isle of Man for a consideration of its population's "ethnogenesis" in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Literary studies and fresh translations follow to return our attention to the remarkable creativity in sagas and poetry that was an especially rich province of Norse and Icelandic culture. Contributors: Matthew Bardowell, Brynja orgeirsdóttir, Francesco Colombo, Caitlin Ellis, Eric A. Haley-Halinski, Shaun F. D. Hughes, Jonathan Y. H. Hui, Philip Lavender, Anna Litvina, James McIntosh, Dirk H. Steinforth, Fjodor Uspenski.
With full-page maps and supplementary photos, this encyclopedia covers every aspect of Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, including rulers and saints, overviews of the countries, religion, education, politics and law, culture and material life, history, literature, and art.
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)
This sourcebook serves both as an introduction and a wide-ranging reference work for human attitudes to nonhuman animals in Latin Europe during the Middle Ages. Under twelve headings, it includes numerous translated passages from Latin and vernacular texts that reflect human conceptions and uses of other animals during the period 300-1520. Theologians, philosophers, encyclopaedists, bestiarists, hagiographers, chroniclers, huntsmen and writers of agricultural manuals, cookbooks and plague treatises all had something to say about the place of nonhuman animals in their world and their interaction with humans, or simply recorded incidentally what they did in their writings. All are represented here.
The analogues discussed are presented with facing translations and detailed bibliographies."--BOOK JACKET.
What did Danes and Swedes in the Middle Ages imagine and write about Jews and Judaism? This book draws on over 100 medieval Danish and Swedish manuscripts and incunabula as well as runic inscriptions and religious art (c. 1200–1515) to answer this question. There were no resident Jews in Scandinavia before the modern period, yet as this book shows ideas and fantasies about them appear to have been widespread and an integral part of life and culture in the medieval North. Volume 1 investigates the possibility of encounters between Scandinavians and Jews, the terminology used to write about Jews, Judaism, and Hebrew, and how Christian writers imagined the Jewish body. The (mis)use of Jews in...