Download or read book Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland written by Oren Falk and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Medieval Iceland written by Sverrir Jakobsson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-09-20 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the ninth century, at the beginning of this account, Iceland was uninhabited save for fowl and smaller Arctic animals. In the middle of the sixteenth century, by the end of this history, it had embarked on a course that led to the creation of a small country on the periphery of Europe. The history of medieval Iceland is to some degree a microcosm of European history, but in other respects it has a trajectory of its own. As in medieval Europe, the evolution of the Church, episodic warfare, and the strengthening of the bonds of government played an important role. Unlike the rest of Europe, however, Iceland was not settled by humans until the Middle Ages and it was without towns and any type of executive government until the late medieval period. Medieval Iceland is a review of Icelandic history from the settlement until the advent of the Reformation, with an emphasis on social and political change, but also on cultural developments, such as the creation of a particular kind of literature, known throughout the world as the sagas. A view of medieval Icelandic history as it has never been told before from one of its leading historians, this book will appeal to students and scholars alike interested in Icelandic and medieval history.

Download or read book Journal of Medieval Military History written by John France and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highlights the range and richness of scholarship on medieval warfare, military institutions, and cultures of conflict that characterize the field. History 95 (2010)

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 Story World and Character in the Late slendingas gur written by Rebecca Merkelbach and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-06-11 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Masculinities in Old Norse Literature written by Gareth Lloyd Evans and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2020-07-17 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Sagas written by Ármann Jakobsson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-02-17 with total page 377 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 Medieval Iceland written by Jesse L. Byock and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1990-02-07 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gift of Joan Wall. Includes index. Includes bibliographical references (p. 227-248) and index. * glr 20090610.

Download or read book Animal Human Relationships in Medieval Iceland written by Harriet Jean Evans Tang and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Domestic animals played a range of roles in the imaginative world of medieval Icelanders: from partners in settlement and household allies, to violent offenders, foster-kin and surrogate wives, they were vital and effective members of the multispecies communities established from the ninth century onwards. This book examines the domestic animals of early Iceland in their physical and textual contexts, through detailed analysis of the spaces and places of the Icelandic farm and farming landscape, and textual sources such as The Book of Settlements, the earliest Icelandic laws, and various episodes from the Sagas and Tales of Icelanders. Taking a multidisciplinary approach to animal-human relationships, it sees animals not solely as symbols, metaphors, or objects, but as subjects in affective relationships with their human co-settlers who become the focus of intense exploration, delight, anxiety and condemnation in later textual narratives. By inviting readers to question how these sources form, embrace, or reject animal-human relationships, it provides a resource for understanding these archaeological sites and textual narratives differently: as products of multispecies communities in which animals and humans lived, worked, and died together.ect animal-human relationships, it provides a resource for understanding these archaeological sites and textual narratives differently: as products of multispecies communities in which animals and humans lived, worked, and died together.ect animal-human relationships, it provides a resource for understanding these archaeological sites and textual narratives differently: as products of multispecies communities in which animals and humans lived, worked, and died together.ect animal-human relationships, it provides a resource for understanding these archaeological sites and textual narratives differently: as products of multispecies communities in which animals and humans lived, worked, and died together.

Download or read book Bloodtaking and Peacemaking written by William Ian Miller and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-05-15 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dubbed by the New York Times as "one of the most sought-after legal academics in the county," William Ian Miller presents the arcane worlds of the Old Norse studies in a way sure to attract the interest of a wide range of readers. Bloodtaking and Peacemaking delves beneath the chaos and brutality of the Norse world to discover a complex interplay of ordering and disordering impulses. Miller's unique and engaging readings of ancient Iceland's sagas and extensive legal code reconstruct and illuminate the society that produced them. People in the saga world negotiated a maze of violent possibility, with strategies that frequently put life and limb in the balance. But there was a paradox in striking the balance—one could not get even without going one better. Miller shows how blood vengeance, law, and peacemaking were inextricably bound together in the feuding process. This book offers fascinating insights into the politics of a stateless society, its methods of social control, and the role that a uniquely sophisticated and self-conscious law played in the construction of Icelandic society. "Illuminating."—Rory McTurk, Times Literary Supplement "An impressive achievement in ethnohistory; it is an amalgam of historical research with legal and anthropological interpretation. What is more, and rarer, is that it is a pleasure to read due to the inclusion of narrative case material from the sagas themselves."—Dan Bauer, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Download or read book Women in Old Norse Literature written by J. Friðriksdóttir and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-03-12 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Old Norse texts offer different ideas about what it is to be female, presenting women in diverse social and economic positions. This book analyzes female characters in medieval Icelandic saga literature, and demonstrates how they engaged with some of the most contested values of the period, revealing the anxieties of both the authors and audiences.

Download or read book Violence and Social Orders written by Douglass Cecil North and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-26 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book integrates the problem of violence into a larger framework, showing how economic and political behavior are closely linked.

Download or read book Why Iceland written by Asgeir Jonsson and published by McGraw Hill Professional. This book was released on 2009-08-07 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As late as the mid 1980s, Iceland’s economy revolved around little else than a semi-robust cod-fishing industry. By the end of the century, however, it had transformed itself into a major player in world finance, building an international banking empire worth twelve times its GDP. The tiny island nation of 300,000 was one of the global economy’s great success stories. And then everything came crashing down. Why Iceland? is the inside account of one of the economic meltdown’s most fascinating and far-reaching tragedies. As Chief Economist of Kaupthing Bank, the country’s largest bank before the collapse, Ásgeir Jónsson is perfectly suited to examine Iceland’s collapse in painstaking detail. He witnessed behind-the-scenes events firsthand, such as an intriguing meeting in January 2008 when a group of international hedge fund managers gathered in a bar in Reykjavik to discuss Iceland’s economy—an informal affair that eventually became the center of a criminal investigation by the country’s Financial Supervisory Authority. This inside account examines the pressing issues behind history’s biggest banking collapse: How did Iceland transform itself from one of Europe’s poorest to one of its wealthiest countries? What happened to cause the destruction of the nation’s banking industry during a single week of October 2008? Was it the result of a speculation “attack” by hedge funds on the nation’s currency? Iceland remains the biggest casualty of the economic downturn, and the ramifications of its catastrophic failure reach deeply into the economies of Europe, the United States, and other global markets. Ásgeir Jónsson offers a unique perspective and an expert’s insight into the rise and fall of this once-proud banking giant. Why Iceland? provides the who, what, where, and when of Iceland’s demise, serving as a fascinating read and providing the understanding necessary for forecasting when and where the aftershocks will shake up markets in other parts of the world. "Fearsome Vikings discovered Iceland. Hedge funds knocked it down. It was a humiliating tumble for the former financial powerhouse, which was proud of its status in Europe. A late bloomer, Iceland had been the last country in Europe to be settled, the Nordic nation rapidly caught up with its wealthier relations. It was all fine until October 2008, when country's banking system collapsed in a week. Written by an Icelandic economist, Why Iceland? chronicles the meltdown, in the context of the nation's history."--New York Post (A "Required Reading" Selection)

Download or read book Monsters in Society written by Rebecca Merkelbach and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dragons, giants, and the monsters of learned discourse are rarely encountered in the Sagas of Icelanders, and therefore, the general teratological focus on physical monstrosity yields only limited results when applied to them. This, however, does not equal an absence of monstrosity – it only means that monstrosity is conceived of differently. This book shifts the view of monstrosity from the physical to the social, accounting for the unique social circumstances presented in the Íslendingasögur and demonstrating how closely interwoven the social and the monstrous are in this genre. Employing literary and cultural theory as well as anthropological and historical approaches, it reads the monsters of the Íslendingasögur in their literary and socio-cultural context, demonstrating that they are not distractions from feud and conflict, but that they are in fact an intrinsic part of the genre’s re-imagining of the past for the needs of the present.

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 Warriors and Peacemakers written by Mark Cooney and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1998-04 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cooney (sociology and law, U. of Georgia) looks at the role of people such as relatives, friends, neighbors, workmates, strangers, and legal officials in encouraging or discouraging others to resolve conflict without violence. He argues that the behavior of the third party depends on how close they are to the principals and whether they are above, below, or level with them in social status. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book Legal Systems Very Different from Ours written by Peter Leeson and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2019-01-09 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at thirteen different legal systems, ranging from Imperial China to modern Amish: how they worked, what problems they faced, how they dealt with them. Some chapters deal with a single legal system, others with topics relevant to several, such as problems with law based on divine revelation or how systems work in which law enforcement is private and decentralized. The book's underlying assumption is that all human societies face the same problems, deal with them in an interesting variety of different ways, are all the work of grown-ups, hence should all be taken seriously. It ends with a chapter on features of past legal systems that a modern system might want to borrow.