Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland

Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland
Author: Oren Falk
Publsiher: Unknown
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2021
Genre: Electronic books
ISBN: 0192635565

Download Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This book investigates the history of violence in medieval Iceland, testing theoretical tools by applying them to a series of case studies drawn from the Icelandic sagas.

Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland

Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland
Author: Oren Falk
Publsiher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2021-03-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780192635570

Download Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Historians spend a lot of time thinking about violence: bloodshed and feats of heroism punctuate practically every narration of the past. Yet historians have been slow to subject 'violence' itself to conceptual analysis. What aspects of the past do we designate violent? To what methodological assumptions do we commit ourselves when we employ this term? How may we approach the category 'violence' in a specifically historical way, and what is it that we explain when we write its history? Astonishingly, such questions are seldom even voiced, much less debated, in the historical literature. Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland: This Spattered Isle lays out a cultural history model for understanding violence. Using interdisciplinary tools, it argues that violence is a positively constructed asset, deployed along three principal axes - power, signification, and risk. Analysing violence in instrumental terms, as an attempt to coerce others, focuses on power. Analysing it in symbolic terms, as an attempt to communicate meanings, focuses on signification. Finally, analysing it in cognitive terms, as an attempt to exercise agency despite imperfect control over circumstances, focuses on risk. Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland explores a place and time notorious for its rampant violence. Iceland's famous sagas hold treasure troves of circumstantial data, ideally suited for past-tense ethnography, yet demand that the reader come up with subtle and innovative methodologies for recovering histories from their stories. The sagas throw into sharp relief the kinds of analytic insights we obtain through cultural interpretation, offering lessons that apply to other epochs too.

Journal of Medieval Military History

Journal of Medieval Military History
Author: John France,Kelly DeVries,Clifford J. Rogers
Publsiher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2015-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781783270576

Download Journal of Medieval Military History Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Highlights the range and richness of scholarship on medieval warfare, military institutions, and cultures of conflict that characterize the field. History 95 (2010)

Reimagining Christendom

Reimagining Christendom
Author: Joel D. Anderson
Publsiher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2023-03-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781512822816

Download Reimagining Christendom Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

With its expanding legal system and its burgeoning throngs of lawyers, legates, and documents, the papacy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries has often been credited with spearheading a governmental revolution that molded the high medieval church into an increasingly disciplined, uniform, and machine-like institution. Reimagining Christendom offers a fresh appraisal of these developments from a surprising and distinctive vantage point. Tracing the web of textual ties that connected the northern fringes of Europe to the Roman see, Joel D. Anderson explores the ways in which Norse writers recruited, refashioned, and repurposed the legal principles and official documents of the Roman church for their own ends. Drawing on little-known vernacular sagas, Reimagining Christendom is populated with tales of married bishops, fictitious and forged papal bulls, and imagined canon law proceedings. These narratives, Anderson argues, demonstrate how Norse writers adapted and reconfigured the institutional power of the church in order to legitimize some of the thoroughly abnormal practices of their native bishops. In the process, Icelandic clerics constructed their own visions of ecclesiastical order--visions that underscore the thoroughly malleable character of the Roman church's text-based government and that articulate diverse ways of belonging to the far-flung imagined community of high medieval Christendom.

Story World and Character in the Late slendingas gur

Story  World and Character in the Late   slendingas  gur
Author: Rebecca Merkelbach
Publsiher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2024-06-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781843846666

Download Story World and Character in the Late slendingas gur Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

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 literature, this book offers a new reading of the relationship between the individual, paranormal, and social dimensions that form the foundation of these sagas. It draws on a multidisciplinary approach, informed by perspectives as diverse as "possible worlds" theory, gender studies, and social history. The "post-classical" sagas are not only read anew and integrated into both their generic and socio-historical context; they are met on their own terms, allowing their fascinating narratives to speak for themselves.

Masculinities in Old Norse Literature

Masculinities in Old Norse Literature
Author: Gareth Lloyd Evans,Jessica Clare Hancock
Publsiher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2020-07-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781843845621

Download Masculinities in Old Norse Literature Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Compared to other areas of medieval literature, the question of masculinity in Old Norse-Icelandic literature has been understudied. This is a neglect which this volume aims to rectify. The essays collected here introduce and analyse a spectrum of masculinities, from the sagas of Icelanders, contemporary sagas, kings' sagas, legendary sagas, chivalric sagas, bishops' sagas, and eddic and skaldic verse, producing a broad and multifaceted understanding of what it means to be masculine in Old Norse-Icelandic texts. A critical introduction places the essays in their scholarly context, providing the reader with a concise orientation in gender studies and the study of masculinities in Old Norse-Icelandic literature. This book's investigation of how masculinities are constructed and challenged within a unique literature is all the more vital in the current climate, in which Old Norse sources are weaponised to support far-right agendas and racist ideologies are intertwined with images of vikings as hypermasculine. This volume counters these troubling narratives of masculinity through explorations of Old Norse literature that demonstrate how masculinity is formed, how it is linked to violence and vulnerability, how it governs men's relationships, and how toxic models of masculinity may be challenged.

Feud in the Icelandic Saga

Feud in the Icelandic Saga
Author: Jesse L. Byock
Publsiher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2023-04-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520341012

Download Feud in the Icelandic Saga Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Feud stands at the core of the Old Icelandic sagas. Jesse Byock shows how the dominant concern of medieval Icelandic society—the channeling of violence into accepted patterns of feud and the regulation of conflict—is reflected in the narrative of the family sagas and the Sturlunga saga compilation. This comprehensive study of narrative structure demonstrates that the sagas are complex expressions of medieval social thought.

Viking Age Iceland

Viking Age Iceland
Author: Jesse L Byock
Publsiher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2001-02-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780141937656

Download Viking Age Iceland Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Medieval Iceland was unique amongst Western Europe, with no foreign policy, no defence forces, no king, no lords, no peasants and few battles. It should have been a utopia yet its literature is dominated by brutality and killing. The reasons for this, argues Jesse Byock, lie in the underlying structures and cultural codes of the islands' social order. 'Viking Age Iceland' is an engaging, multi-disciplinary work bringing together findings in anthropology and ethnography interwoven with historical fact and masterful insights into the popular Icelandic sagas, this is a brilliant reconstruction of the inner workings of a unique and intriguing society.