Download or read book The Social Consequences of Literacy in Medieval Scandinavia written by Arnved Nedkvitne and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2004 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1000 and 1536 Scandinavia was transformed from a conglomerate of largely pre-state societies to societies characterized by state governments. Its most important single aspect was the increasing monopolization of 'legitimate' violence by the state. But Church and State also used literacy to strengthen social control, and they did so in central and important areas: jurisdiction, religious conformity and accounting. Thus, they hoped to control the areas they understood to be most important. Their intentions were largely fulfilled. The main driving force behind the transition to state societies was the monopolization of legitimate violence, but the use of literacy made a difference as well. By writing down oral 'laws', and by increasingly resorting to writing in traditionally oral judicial procedures, the state gradually gained control of institutionalized social practices with a minimum of 'legitimate violence'. Written laws made social norms more precise and easier to change, a necessity in an increasingly complex society. Writing also strengthened social cohesion by creating common religious rituals, procedures and narratives. Written accounts made taxation more stable and therefore seem more just and acceptable. The basic social transformations of the period cannot be attributed to increasing literacy alone. But the written word rendered the reorganization of society in Scandinavia more peaceful and gradual, strengthened social conformity and cohesion.

Download or read book The Social Consequences of Literacy in Medieval Scandinavia written by Arnved Nedkvitne and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2004 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1000 and 1536 Scandinavia was transformed from a conglomerate of largely pre-state societies to societies characterized by state governments. Its most important single aspect was the increasing monopolization of 'legitimate' violence by the state. But Church and State also used literacy to strengthen social control, and they did so in central and important areas: jurisdiction, religious conformity and accounting. Thus, they hoped to control the areas they understood to be most important. Their intentions were largely fulfilled. The main driving force behind the transition to state societies was the monopolization of legitimate violence, but the use of literacy made a difference as well. By writing down oral 'laws', and by increasingly resorting to writing in traditionally oral judicial procedures, the state gradually gained control of institutionalized social practices with a minimum of 'legitimate violence'. Written laws made social norms more precise and easier to change, a necessity in an increasingly complex society. Writing also strengthened social cohesion by creating common religious rituals, procedures and narratives. Written accounts made taxation more stable and therefore seem more just and acceptable. The basic social transformations of the period cannot be attributed to increasing literacy alone. But the written word rendered the reorganization of society in Scandinavia more peaceful and gradual, strengthened social conformity and cohesion.

Download or read book Scandinavia in the Middle Ages 900 1550 written by Kirsi Salonen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-02-14 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. This book is essential reading for students of, as well as all those interested in, medieval Scandinavia and Europe more broadly.

Download or read book Medieval East Central Europe in a Comparative Perspective written by Gerhard Jaritz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval East Central Europe in a Comparative Perspective draws together the new perspectives concerning the relevance of East Central Europe for current historiography by placing the region in various comparative contexts. The chapters compare conditions within East Central Europe, as well as between East Central Europe, the rest of the continent, and beyond. Including 15 original chapters from an interdisciplinary team of contributors, this collection begins by posing the question: "What is East Central Europe?" with three specialists offering different interpretations and presenting new conclusions. The book is then grouped into five parts which examine political practice, religion, urban experience, and art and literature. The contributors question and explain the reasons for similarities and differences in governance and strategies for handling allies, enemies or subjects in particular ways. They point out themes and structures from town planning to religious orders that did not function according to political boundaries, and for which the inclusion of East Central European territories was systemic. The volume offers a new interpretation of medieval East Central Europe, beyond its traditional limits in space and time and beyond the established conceptual schemes. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of medieval East Central Europe.

Download or read book The Languages of Early Medieval Charters written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-11-23 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first major study of the interplay between Latin and Germanic vernaculars in early medieval records, examining the role of language choice in the documentary cultures of the Anglo-Saxon and eastern Frankish worlds.

Download or read book Vox regis Royal Communication in High Medieval Norway written by David Brégaint and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Vox regis: Royal Communication in High Medieval Norway, David Brégaint examines how the Norwegian monarchy gradually managed to infiltrate Norwegian society through the development of a communicative system during the High Middle Ages, from c. 1150 to c. 1300. Drawing on sagas, didactic literature, charters, and laws, the book demonstrates how the Norwegian kings increasingly played a key -role in the promotion of royal ideology in society through rituals and the written word. In particular, the book stresses the interaction between secular and clerical culture, the role of the Church and of the Norwegian aristocracy

Download or read book From Memory to Written Record written by Michael T. Clanchy and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-07-05 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This seminal work of scholarship, which traces the development of literacy in medieval England, is now fully updated in a third edition. This book serves as an introduction to medieval books and documents for graduate students throughout the world Features a completely re-written first chapter, ‘Memories and Myths of the Norman Conquest', and a new postscript by the author reflecting on the reception to the original publication and discussing recent scholarship on medieval literacy Includes a revised guide to further reading and a revision of the plates which illustrate medieval manuscripts in detail

Download or read book Force of Words A Cultural History of Christianity and Politics in Medieval Iceland 11th 13th Centuries written by Haraldur Hreinsson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-03-29 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Sagas written by Ármann Jakobsson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-02-17 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last fifty years have seen a significant change in the focus of saga studies, from a preoccupation with origins and development to a renewed interest in other topics, such as the nature of the sagas and their value as sources to medieval ideologies and mentalities. The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Sagas presents a detailed interdisciplinary examination of saga scholarship over the last fifty years, sometimes juxtaposing it with earlier views and examining the sagas both as works of art and as source materials. This volume will be of interest to Old Norse and medieval Scandinavian scholars and accessible to medievalists in general.

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to English Studies written by Constant Leung and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-14 with total page 686 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: English is now a global phenomenon no longer defined by fixed territorial, cultural and social functions. The Routledge Companion to English Studies provides an authoritative overview of the subject area. Taking into account the changing conceptualisations of English, this Companion considers both historical trajectories and contemporary perspectives whilst also showcasing the state-of-the-art contributions made by the established scholars of the field. The Routledge Companion to English Studies: provides a set of broad perspectives on English as a subject of study and research highlights the importance of the link between English and other languages within the concepts of multilingualism and polylingualism investigates the use of language in communication through the medium of digital technology covering key issues such as Digital Literacies, Multimodal Literacies and Games and Broadcast Language explores the role of English in education taking account of social, ethnographic and global perspectives on pedagogical issues. This collection of thirty-four newly commissioned articles provides a comprehensive and up-to-date picture of the dynamic and diverse field of English Studies and will be an invaluable text for advanced students and researchers in this area.

Download or read book Iceland s Relationship with Norway c 870 c 1100 written by Ann-Marie Long and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-07-03 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Iceland’s Relationship with Norway c.870 – c.1100: Memory, History and Identity, Ann-Marie Long reassesses the development of early Icelandic society and how it was memorialised, with particular attention given to the place of Norway in Icelandic cultural memory.

Download or read book Ideology and Power in the Viking and Middle Ages written by Gro Steinsland and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-04-21 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses the Nordic pre-Christian ideology of rulership, and its confrontation with, survival into and adaptation to the European Christian ideals during the transition from the Viking to the Middle Ages from the ninth to the thirteenth century.

Download or read book Between History and Myth written by Bruce Lincoln and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-09-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All groups tell stories about their beginnings. Such tales are oft-repeated, finely wrought, and usually much beloved. Among those institutions most in need of an impressive creation account is the state: it’s one of the primary ways states attempt to legitimate themselves. But such founding narratives invite revisionist retellings that modify details of the story in ways that undercut, ironize, and even ridicule the state’s ideal self-representation. Medieval accounts of how Norway was unified by its first king provide a lively, revealing, and wonderfully entertaining example of this process. Taking the story of how Harald Fairhair unified Norway in the ninth century as its central example, Bruce Lincoln illuminates the way a state’s foundation story blurs the distinction between history and myth and how variant tellings of origin stories provide opportunities for dissidence and subversion as subtle—or not so subtle—modifications are introduced through details of character, incident, and plot structure. Lincoln reveals a pattern whereby texts written in Iceland were more critical and infinitely more subtle than those produced in Norway, reflecting the fact that the former had a dual audience: not just the Norwegian court, but also Icelanders of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, whose ancestors had fled from Harald and founded the only non-monarchic, indeed anti-monarchic, state in medieval Europe. Between History and Myth will appeal not only to specialists in Scandinavian literature and history but also to anyone interested in memory and narrative.

Download or read book Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages written by Mark Chinca and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-25 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did new literatures begin in the Middle Ages and what does it mean to ask about such beginnings? These are the questions this volume pursues across the regions and languages of medieval Europe, from Iceland, Scandinavia, and Iberia through Irish, Welsh, English, French, Dutch, Occitan, German, Italian, Czech, and Croatian to Medieval Greek and the East Slavonic of early Rus. Focusing on vernacular scripted cultures and their complicated relationships with the established literary cultures of Latin, Greek, and Church Slavonic, the volume's contributors describe the processes of emergence, consolidation, and institutionalization that make it possible to speak of a literary tradition in any given language. Moreover, by concentrating on beginnings, the volume avoids the pitfalls of viewing earlier phenomena through the lens of later, national developments; the result is a heightened sense of the historical contingency of categories of language, literature, and territory in the space we call 'Europe'.

Download or read book Quantitative Approaches to Medieval Swedish Law written by Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a novel framework for studying historical legalisation using quantitative methods, with 10 fully-preserved laws from medieval Sweden, written between c. 1225 and 1350, serving as a case study. By applying a systematic classification scheme to each legal provision, it is possible to investigate the major differences and similarities in structure and content between the 10 laws. This, in turn, allows for the re-assessment of many long-standing problems in Swedish and European medieval legal history that have been challenging to address with traditional methods based on text analyses. Over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, major changes in the proportion of legal provisions devoted to different fields of law, and to prescribed consequences, are found. The book shows how the proportions of civil law and public law expanded at the expense of criminal law. Furthermore, a clear transition from casuistic to more abstract law provisions can also be witnessed.

Download or read book Reimagining Christendom written by Joel D. Anderson and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2023-03-14 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Religious Reading in the Lutheran North written by Charlotte Appel and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2011-01-18 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious Reading in the Lutheran North opens up the doors to a part of early modern European history that has often been overlooked. In the Nordic countries, an abundance of religious literature in the vernacular was produced in the centuries following the Reformation, and reading was almost exclusively taught to children in a Lutheran Protestant setting. Literacy rates were high, and by the mid eighteenth century around ninety per cent of both men and women could read. The eight contributions to the present book investigate different aspects of religious reading in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Greenland, looking at the publication and dissemination strategies of authors and clergymen, as well as reading habits and interpretations among Scandinavian readers.