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Over recent decades the concept of literacy has been an important field of discussion in Medieval and Early Modern studies, and questions concerning the uses of literacy, the number of literates, differing writing systems, modes of communication and the interaction between orality and literacy have occupied researchers from various disciplines. The aim of this volume is to introduce Scandinavian literacy to the international field of research. On the one hand, to provide a basis that can contribute to a better general understanding of literacy. Because of the volume's interdisciplinary approach, a relatively wide range of material is invoked to illuminate the subject matter.
In recent years, the field of Memory Studies has emerged as a key approach in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and has increasingly shown its ability to open new windows on Nordic Studies as well. The entries in this book document the work-to-date of this approach on the pre-modern Nordic world (mainly the Viking Age and the Middle Ages, but including as well both earlier and later periods). Given that Memory Studies is an ever expanding critical strategy, the approximately eighty contributors in this volume also discuss the potential for future research in this area. Topics covered range from texts to performance to visual and other aspects of material culture, all approached from within an interdisciplinary framework. International specialists, coming from such relevant fields as archaeology, mythology, history of religion, folklore, history, law, art, literature, philology, language, and mediality, offer assessments on the relevance of Memory Studies to their disciplines and show it at work in case studies. Finally, this handbook demonstrates the various levels of culture where memory had a critical impact in the pre-modern North and how deeply embedded the role of memory is in the material itself.
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.
Reading the Runes in Old English and Old Norse Poetry is the first book-length study to compare responses to runic heritage in the literature of Anglo-Saxon England and medieval Iceland. The Anglo-Saxon runic script had already become the preserve of antiquarians at the time the majority of Old English poetry was written down, and the Icelanders recording the mythology associated with the script were at some remove from the centres of runic practice in medieval Scandinavia. Both literary cultures thus inherited knowledge of the runic system and the traditions associated with it, but viewed this literate past from the vantage point of a developed manuscript culture. There has, as yet, been no comprehensive study of poetic responses to this scriptural heritage, which include episodes in such canonical texts as Beowulf, the Old English riddles and the poems of the Poetic Edda. By analysing the inflection of the script through shared literary traditions, this study enhances our understanding of the burgeoning of literary self-awareness in early medieval vernacular poetry and the construction of cultural memory, and furthers our understanding of the relationship between Anglo-Saxon and Norse textual cultures. The introduction sets out in detail the rationale for examining runes in poetry as a literary motif and surveys the relevant critical debates. The body of the volume is comprised of five linked case studies of runes in poetry, viewing these representations through the paradigm of scriptural reconstruction and the validation of contemporary literary, historical and religious sensibilities.
Disputes lie at the heart of the sagas. Consequently, literary texts have been treated as sources of legal practice – narrations of law – while the sagas themselves and the handling of legal matters by the figures adhere to ‘laws of narration’. The volume addresses this intricate relationship between literature and social practice from the perspective of historians as well as philologists. The contributions focus not only on disputes and their solution in saga literature, but also on the representation of law and its history in sagas and Latin historiography from Scandinavia as well as the representation of laws and norms in mythological texts. They demonstrate that narrations of law provide an indispensable insight into legal culture and its connection to a wider framework of social norms, adjusting the impression given by the laws. The philological approaches underline that the narrative texts also have an agenda of their own when it comes to their representation of law, providing a mirror of conduct, criticising inequity, reinforcing the political and juridical position of kings or negotiating norms in mythological texts. Altogether, the volume underlines the unifying force exerted by a common fiction of law beyond its letter.
This book brings together Old Norse-Icelandic literature and critical strategies of memory, and argues that some of the particularities of this vernacular textual tradition are explained by the fact that this literature derives from, represents, and incorporates into its designs mnemonic devices of different kinds. Even if Old Norse-Icelandic manuscript culture is relatively silent about the mnemonic context of the literature, the texts themselves exhibit multiple reminiscences of memory. By showing that this literature reveals glimpses of mnemonic technologies at the same time as it testifies to a cultural memory, this study demonstrates how ‘the past’, and narrative traditions about the past, were constructed in a dynamic relationship with ideas that existed at the time the texts were written. Moreover, the book deals with the function of memory in early book-culture, with metaphors of memory, and with mnemonic cues such as spatiality and visuality. With its new readings of canonical texts like the Íslendingasǫgur, the Prose Edda and selected eddic poems, as well as of less widely studied branches of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, such as the sagas of bishops and religious texts, this book will be of interest to Old Norse scholars and to scholars interested in medieval Scandinavia and memory studies.
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.
This volume explores Nordic textbooks chronologically and empirically from the Protestant reformation to our own time. The chapters are written by scholars from Finland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and deploy a wide range of methods, representing different academic fields.
This volume strengthens interest and research in the fields of both Childhood Studies and Nordic Studies by exploring conceptions of children and childhood in the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden). Although some books have been written about the history of childhood in these countries, few are multidisciplinary, focus on this region as a whole, or are available in English. This volume contains essays by scholars from the fields of literature, history, theology, religious studies, intellectual history, cultural studies, Scandinavian studies, education, music, and art history. Contributors study the history of childhood in a wide variety of sources, such as folk and fairy tales, legal codes, religious texts, essays on education, letters, sermons, speeches, hymns, paintings, novels, and school essays written by children themselves. They also examine texts intended specifically for children, including text books, catechisms, newspapers, songbooks, and children’s literature. By bringing together scholars from multiple disciplines who raise distinctive questions about childhood and take into account a wide range of sources, the book offers a fresh and substantive contribution to the history of childhood in the Nordic countries between 1700 and 1960. The volume also helps readers trace the historical roots of the internationally recognized practices and policies regarding child welfare within the Nordic countries today and prompts readers from any country to reflect on their own conceptions of and commitments to children.
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.