Focuses on the complex and diversified nature of lay belief in medieval Norse society. This work suggests that laypeople had a firm belief in life after death - with all central rituals and beliefs seen as a means to this end.

A rich study of what medieval Christianity meant for ordinary people, and how it changed across the middle ages, arguably as profound as changes in the Reformation period, providing a wider context for medieval Christianity by focusing on southern France in a period mainly known for heresy and for the Church's attack upon heresy.

This book provides an introduction to current work and new directions in the study of medieval liturgy. It focuses primarily on so-called occasional rituals such as burial, church consecration, exorcism and excommunication rather than on the Mass and Office. Recent research on such rites challenges many established ideas, especially about the extent to which they differed from place to place and over time, and how the surviving evidence should be interpreted. These essays are designed to offer guidance about current thinking, especially for those who are new to the subject, want to know more about it, or wish to conduct research on liturgical topics. Bringing together scholars working in different disciplines (history, literature, architectural history, musicology and theology), time periods (from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries) and intellectual traditions, this collection demonstrates the great potential that liturgical evidence offers for understanding many aspects of the Middle Ages. It includes essays that discuss the practicalities of researching liturgical rituals; show through case studies the problems caused by over-reliance on modern editions; explore the range of sources for particular ceremonies and the sort of questions which can be asked of them; and go beyond the rites themselves to investigate how liturgy was practised and understood in the medieval period.

Scandinavia, a land mass comprising the modern countries of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, was the last part of Europe to be inhabited by humans. Not until the end of the last Ice Age when the melting of huge ice sheets left behind a fresh, barren land surface, about 13,000 BC, did the first humans arrive and settle in the region. The archaeological record of these prehistoric cultures, much of it remarkably preserved in Scandinavia's bogs, lakes, and fjords, has given us a detailed portrait of the evolution of human society at the edge of the inhabitable world. In this book, distinguished archaeologist T. Douglas Price provides a history of Scandinavia from the arrival of the first humans to the end of the Viking period, ca. AD 1050. The first book of its kind in English in many years, Ancient Scandinavia features overviews of each prehistoric epoch followed by illustrative examples from the region's rich archaeology. An engrossing and comprehensive picture of change across the millennia emerges, showing how human society evolved from small bands of hunter-gatherers to large farming communities to the complex warrior cultures of the Bronze and Iron Ages, cultures which culminated in the spectacular rise of the Vikings at the end of the prehistoric period. The material evidence of these past societies--arrowheads from reindeer hunts, megalithic tombs, rock art, beautifully wrought weaponry, Viking warships--give vivid testimony to the ancient peoples of Scandinavia and to their extensive contacts with the remote cultures of the Arctic Circle, Western Europe, and the Mediterranean

How could a community of 2000–3000 Viking peasants survive in Arctic Greenland for 430 years (ca. 985–1415), and why did they finally disappear? European agriculture in an Arctic environment encountered serious ecological challenges. The Norse peasants faced these challenges by adapting agricultural practices they had learned from the Atlantic and North Sea coast of Norway. Norse Greenland was the stepping stone for the Europeans who first discovered America and settled briefly in Newfoundland ca. AD 1000. The community had a global significance which surpassed its modest size. In the last decades scholars have been nearly unanimous in emphasising that long-term climatic and environmental changes created a situation where Norse agriculture was no longer sustainable and the community was ruined. A secondary hypothesis has focused on ethnic confrontations between Norse peasants and Inuit hunters. In the last decades ethnic violence has been on the rise in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and parts of Africa. In some cases it has degenerated into ethnic cleansing. This has strengthened the interest in ethnic violence in past societies. Challenging traditional hypotheses is a source of progress in all science. The present book does this on the basis of relevant written and archaeological material respecting the methodology of both sciences.

This is Volume One of a two-volume collection that brings together contributions from cultural and military history to offer an examination of religious rites employed in connection with warfare as well as their transformative and power- and identity-building potential across political communities of medieval Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe. Covering the period ca. 900 and 1500, the work takes theoretical, textual and practical approaches to the research on religious warfare, and investigates the connections between, and significance and function of crucial war rituals such as pre-, intra- and postbellum rites, as well as various activities surrounding the military life of individuals, polities, and corporates. Contributors are Robert Antonín, Robert Bubczyk, Dariusz Dąbrowski, Jesse Harrington, Carsten Selch Jensen, Sini Kangas, Radosław Kotecki, Gregory Leighton, Kyle C. Lincoln, Jacek Maciejewski, Yulia Mikhailova, Max Naderer, László Veszprémy, and Dušan Zupka.

Haraldur Hreinsson examines the social and political significance of the Christian religion as the Roman Church was taking hold in medieval Iceland in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries.

Maríu saga, the Old Norse-Icelandic life of the Virgin Mary, survives in nineteen manuscripts. While the 1871 edition of the saga provides two versions based on multiple manuscripts and prints significant variants in the notes, it does not preserve the literary and social contexts of those manuscripts. In the extant manuscripts Maríu saga rarely exists in the codex by itself. This study restores the saga to its manuscript contexts in order to better understand the meaning of the text within its manuscript matrix, why it was copied in the specific manuscripts it was, and how it was read and used by the different communities that preserved the manuscripts.

A concise history of medieval Scandinavia Christianity and European-style monarchy—the cross and the scepter—were introduced to Scandinavia in the tenth century, a development that was to have profound implications for all of Europe. Cross and Scepter is a concise history of the Scandinavian kingdoms from the age of the Vikings to the Reformation, written by Scandinavia's leading medieval historian. Sverre Bagge shows how the rise of the three kingdoms not only changed the face of Scandinavia, but also helped make the territorial state the standard political unit in Western Europe. He describes Scandinavia’s momentous conversion to Christianity and the creation of church and monarchy there, and traces how these events transformed Scandinavian law and justice, military and administrative organization, social structure, political culture, and the division of power among the king, aristocracy, and common people. Bagge sheds important new light on the reception of Christianity and European learning in Scandinavia, and on Scandinavian history writing, philosophy, political thought, and courtly culture. He looks at the reception of European impulses and their adaptation to Scandinavian conditions, and examines the relationship of the three kingdoms to each other and the rest of Europe, paying special attention to the inter-Scandinavian unions and their consequences for the concept of government and the division of power. Cross and Scepter provides an essential introduction to Scandinavian medieval history for scholars and general readers alike, offering vital new insights into state formation and cultural change in Europe.