Название: Scandinavia in the Middle Ages 900-1550: Between Two Oceans
Автор: Kirsi Salonen, Kurt Villads Jensen
Издательство: Routledge
Год: 2023
Страниц: 341
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 46.5 MB

Medieval Scandinavia went through momentous changes. Regional power centres merged and gave birth to the three strong kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. At the end of the Middle Ages, they together formed the enormous Kalmar Union comprising almost all lands around the North Atlantic and the Baltic Sea. In the Middle Ages, Scandinavia became part of a common Europe, yet preserved its own distinct cultural markers.

Scandinavia in the Middle Ages 900–1550 covers the entire Middle Ages into an engaging narrative. The book gives a chronological overview of political, ecclesiastical, cultural, and economic developments. It integrates to this narrative climatic changes, energy crises, devastating epidemies, family life and livelihood, arts, education, technology and literature, and much else. The book shows how different groups had an important role in shaping society: kings and peasants, pious priests, nuns and crusaders, merchants, and students, without forgetting minorities such as Sámi and Jews. The book is divided into three chronological parts 900–1200, 1200–1400, and 1400–1550, where analyses of general trends are illustrated by the acts of individual men and women.

The northern people have stimulated the interest and imaginations of historians for a long time, beginning with the Byzantine historian Jordanes. He wrote around 550 that Scandinavia – Scandza – was the hive of peoples, from which the Goths and others, leaving their cold homes, swarmed like bees throughout all Europe, fighting, conquering, and carving out for themselves new kingdoms. It is not clear what Jordanes exactly meant by Scandza in terms of geographic scope, since he had no personal knowledge of the Nordic territories.

The lands and the peoples of the north became more widely known in the Middle Ages, and later medieval authors were able of describing Scandinavia and Scandinavians with increasing detail: the vita of the missionary Ansgar, from c. 870, mentioned his travels to Denmark and Sweden and the founding of churches, but not much else. Adam of Bremen writing in the early 1070s also knew of Iceland in the Northern Atlantic, Greenland far away in the west, and even Finland or Sápmi, but to him the latter areas were clearly semi-mythical.

From the 12th century onwards, the Scandinavians began to write their own history. The sagas contain detailed stories about the events in Scandinavia, and c. 1200 the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus wrote his Gesta Danorum, in which he narrates the Danes’ medieval history. Numerous medieval and early modern authors have then followed this tradition and written about Scandinavia and its history.

Scandinavian medieval history is still relevant and interesting to students and scholars, and the amount of modern research literature on different aspects of medieval Scandinavia is enormous. There are thousands of research articles and hundreds of monographs and anthologies, both bigger and smaller, written in local languages as well as English, German, French, and so on. This book is one in the continuum. It is intended as a textbook for graduate students and everybody interested in the history of Scandinavia in the Middle Ages, and it aims to give readers a comprehensive overview.

In this book, Scandinavia is understood in a very broad sense. It is not only about the medieval history of the three kingdoms in the Scandinavian Peninsula, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, but it has also tried to include the eastern parts of the Scandinavian kingdoms around the Baltic, Finland, and northern Estonia, and in west Iceland, Greenland, and the islands in the North Atlantic. The northern parts of Scandinavia inhabited by the Sami, who continued to live according to their own culture but had many contacts with the other Scandinavians, have also been included in this book.

This book is essential reading for students of, as well as all those interested in, medieval Scandinavia and Europe more broadly.