Collegium Medievale

This volume is a collection of 30 papers on the broad subject of the Scandinavian expansion westwards to Britain, Ireland and the North Atlantic, with a particular emphasis on settlement. The volume has been prepared in tribute to the work of Barbara E. Crawford on this subject, and to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the publication of her seminal book, Scandinavian Scotland. Reflecting Dr Crawford's interests, the papers cover a range of disciplines, and are arranged into four main sections: History and Cultural Contacts; The Church and the Cult of Saints; Archaeology, Material Culture and Settlement; Place-Names and Language. The combination provides a variety of new perspectives both on the Viking expansion and on Scandinavia's continued contacts across the North Sea in the post-Viking period.Contributors include: Lesley Abrams, Haki Antonsson, Beverley Ballin Smith, James Barrett, Paul Bibire, Nicholas Brooks, Dauvit Broun, Margaret Cormac, Neil Curtis, Clare Downham, Gillian Fellows-Jensen, Ian Fisher, Katherine Forsyth, Peder Gammeltoft, Sarah Jane Gibbon, Mark Hall, Hans Emil Liden, Christopher Lowe, Joanne McKenzie, Christopher Morris, Elizabeth Okasha, Elizabeth Ridel, Liv Schei, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Brian Smith, Steffen Stumann Hansen, Frans Arne Stylegård, Simon Taylor, William Thomson, Gareth Williams, Doreen Waugh and Alex Woolf.

Disputes lie at the heart of the sagas. Consequently, literary texts have been treated as sources of legal practice – narrations of law – while the sagas themselves and the handling of legal matters by the figures adhere to ‘laws of narration’. The volume addresses this intricate relationship between literature and social practice from the perspective of historians as well as philologists. The contributions focus not only on disputes and their solution in saga literature, but also on the representation of law and its history in sagas and Latin historiography from Scandinavia as well as the representation of laws and norms in mythological texts. They demonstrate that narrations of law provide an indispensable insight into legal culture and its connection to a wider framework of social norms, adjusting the impression given by the laws. The philological approaches underline that the narrative texts also have an agenda of their own when it comes to their representation of law, providing a mirror of conduct, criticising inequity, reinforcing the political and juridical position of kings or negotiating norms in mythological texts. Altogether, the volume underlines the unifying force exerted by a common fiction of law beyond its letter.

In the Nordic medieval laws a new definition of kinship – a canonical one – was introduced, based on the Church’s incest prohibitions and the requirement to love your kin. It influences the rules for property transfer, inheritance, wergeld and marriage.

This book seeks to revitalise the somewhat stagnant scholarly debate on Germanic rulership in the first millennium AD. A series of comprehensive chapters combines literary evidence on Scandinavia’s polities, kings, and other rulers with archaeological, documentary, toponymical, and linguistic evidence. The picture that emerges is one of surprisingly stable rulership institutions, sites, and myths, while control of them was contested between individuals, dynasties, and polities. While in the early centuries, Scandinavia was integrated in Germanic Europe, profound societal and cultural changes in 6th-century Scandinavia and the Christianisation of Continental and English kingdoms set northern kingship on a different path. The pagan heroic warrior ethos, essential to kingship, was developed and refined; only to recur overseas embodied in 9th–10th-century Vikings. Three chapters on a hitherto unknown masonry royal manor at Avaldsnes in western Norway, excavated 2017, concludes this volume with discussions of the late-medieval peak of Norwegian kingship and it’s eventual downfall in the late 14th century. This book’s discussions and results are relevant to all scholars and students of 1st-millenium Germanic kingship, polities, and societies.

Tyerman gives a sweeping new vision of one of history's most astounding events: the Crusades. Drawing on all of the most recent scholarship, and told with great verve and authority, "God's War" is the definitive account of a fascinating and horrifying story that continues to haunt our contemporary world.

The annual journal Palaeohistoria is edited by the staff of the Groningen Institute of Archaeology, and carries detailed articles on material culture, analysis of radiocarbon data and the results of excavations, surveys and coring campaigns.

The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue—in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science—but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism. The Middle English Book addresses a series of questions about the copying and circulation of literature in late medieval England: How do we make sense of the variety of manuscripts surviving from this period? Who copied and disseminated these diverse manuscripts? Who read the literary texts that they transmit? And what was the relationship between those copying literature and those reading it? To answer these questions, this book examines 202 literary manuscripts from the period 1350 to 1500. First, this study suggests that most surviving manuscripts fall into four categories, depending on the proximity and relationship of that manuscript's scribes and readers. But beyond proposing these new categories, this book also looks at the history of writing practices, and demonstrates the ubiquity of bureaucracies within late medieval England. As a result, The Middle English Book argues that literary production was a decentered affair, one that took place within these numerous, modest, yet complex, bureaucracies. But this book also argues that, because literary production arose in such scattered bureaucracies, manuscripts were local products, produced within the cultural and economic milieu of their users. Manuscripts thus form a fundamentally different sort of cultural artefact than the printed books with which we are familiar—a form of centralized, urbanized, and commercialized textual production that was just over the historical horizon in late medieval England.