Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe

While the multilingualism of the medieval world has been at the forefront of research agendas across medieval studies in recent years there nonetheless remain many questions to answer. What for example were the stakes and consequences of multilingualism for literary culture? And how do these change if we think of multilingualism through cultural social artistic or material lenses? Taking such concerns as their starting point the essays in this volume address a variety of aspects of medieval literature and literary culture related to multilingualism. They deal with multilingualism in relation to manuscripts literary contexts and historical contexts. The chapters gathered together here address considerations that have been overlooked in previous scholarship and ask where the future of the study of medieval multilingualism lies. Contributions to the volume are grouped thematically rather than by date or period in order to draw out comparative perspectives with the aim of encouraging innovative new approaches to future research in the field.

While the medieval regions that form modern-day Britain Ireland Iceland and the Scandinavian states were very much like today home to diverse ethnic and linguistic groups it is evident that the peoples who inhabited the north-western Atlantic seaboard at this time were nonetheless connected by key cultural environmental historical and ideological experiences that set them apart from other regions of Europe. This volume is the first to focus specifically on these cultural and linguistic connections from the perspective of the history of emotions. The contributions collected here examine cultural encounters among medieval North Atlantic peoples with regard to the gradual development of shared emotional models and the emergence of early cross-cultural emotional communities in this region. The chapters also explore how the folk psychologies illustrated in the oldest European vernacular writing traditions (Irish English and Scandinavian) bear witness to cultural models for emotions that first took shape in pre-Christian times.

While it is well-established that Brittany and the Insular world were closely linked during the medieval period the precise nature of these connections continues to spark debate. Was there a significant migration in the fifth century or were the connections more multi-faceted and enduring than medieval accounts suggest? And how might we triangulate the Atlantic connections with other influences on medieval Brittany including those from the Carolingian world?

Drawing together research that was first presented at the conference ‘Brittany and the Atlantic Archipelago: Contact Myth and History 450-1200’ held in Cambridge in December 2017 this volume seeks to present new and ground-breaking research into both Brittany and its broader European context during the medieval period. The chapters gathered here range across various disciplines including textual history archaeology hagiography onomastics and the study of liturgical evidence offering new insights into our understanding of medieval Brittany as well as drawing out particular connections (and disconnections) between Brittany and its neighbours.

Celts Gaels and Britons offers a miscellany of essays exploring three closely connected areas within the fields of Celtic Studies in order to shed new light on the ancient and medieval Celtic languages and their literatures. Taking as its inspiration the scholarship of Professor Patrick Sims-Williams to whom this volume is dedicated the papers gathered together here explore the Continental Celtic languages texts from the Irish Sea world and the literature and linguistics of the British languages among them Welsh and Cornish. With essays from eighteen leading scholars in the field this in-depth volume serves not only as a monument to the rich and varied career of Sims-Williams but also offers a wealth of commentary and information to present significant primary research and reconsiderations of existing scholarship.

The term ‘sacred’ is often used in relation to the pre-Christian religions of Iron Age and medieval Scandinavia. But what did sacred really mean? What made something sacred for people? Why was one particular person place act or text perceived to hold a sacral quality while others remained profane? And what impact did such sacrality have on wider society culture politics and economics both for contemporaries and for future generations?

This volume seeks to engage with such questions by drawing together essays from many of the pre-eminent scholars of Old Norse in order to reinterpret the concept of the sacred in the Viking Age North and to challenge pre-existing frameworks for understanding the sacred in this space and time. Including essays from Margaret Clunies Ross Stephen Mitchell John Lindow and Judy Quinn it is a treasury of commentary and information that ranges widely across theories and sources of evidence to present significant primary research and reconsiderations of existing scholarship. This edited collection is dedicated to Stefan Brink an outstanding figure in the study of early Scandinavian language society and culture and it takes as its inspiration the diversity interdisciplinarity and vitality of his own research in order to make a major new contribution to the field of Old Norse studies.

In medieval Europe cultural political and linguistic identities rarely coincided with modern national borders. As early as the end of the twelfth century French rose to prominence as a lingua franca that could facilitate communication between people regardless of their origin background or community. Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries literary works were written or translated into French not only in France but also across Europe from England and the Low Countries to as far afield as Italy Cyprus and the Holy Land. Many of these texts had a broad European circulation and for well over three hundred years they were transmitted read studied imitated and translated.

Drawing on the results of the AHRC-funded research project Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France this volume aims to reassess medieval literary culture and explore it in a European and Mediterranean setting. The book incorporating nineteen papers by international scholars explores the circulation and production of francophone texts outside of France along two major axes of transmission: one stretching from England and Normandy across to Flanders and Burgundy and the other running across the Pyrenees and Alps from the Iberian Peninsula to the Levant. In doing so it offers new insights into how francophone literature forged a place for itself both in medieval textual culture and more generally in Western cultural spheres.

This multi-disciplinary volume draws on the combined expertise of specialists in the history and literature of medieval Ireland Iceland Norway and Scotland to shed new light on the interplay of Norse and Gaelic literary traditions. Through four detailed case-studies which examine the Norwegian Konungs skuggsjá the Icelandic Njáls saga and Landnámabók and the Gaelic text Baile Suthach Sith Emhna the volume explores the linguistic cultural and political contacts that existed between Norse and Gaelic speakers in the High Middle Ages and examines the impetus behind these texts including oral tradition transfer of written sources and authorial adaption and invention. Crucially these texts are not only examined as literary products of the thirteenth century but also as repositories of older historical traditions and the authors seek to explore these wider historical contexts as well as analyse how and why historical and literary material was transmitted. The volume contains English translations of key extracts and also provides a detailed discussion of sources and methodologies to ensure that this milestone of scholarship is accessible to both students and subject-specialists.

‘This is a brilliant and genuinely ground-breaking book representing a significant step forward in literary and historical analysis of the Norse-Gaelic interface’. (Professor Ralph O’Connor University of Aberdeen).

This book is devoted to the study of multilingual Britain in the later medieval period from the Norman Conquest to John Skelton. It brings together experts from different disciplines — history linguistics and literature - in a joint effort to recover the complexities of spoken and written communication in the Middle Ages. Each author focuses on one specific text or text type and demonstrates by example what careful analysis can reveal about the nature of medieval multilingualism and about medieval attitudes to the different living languages of later medieval Britain. There are chapters on charters sermons religious prose glossaries manorial records biblical translations chronicles and the macaronic poetry of William Langland and John Skelton. By addressing the full range of languages spoken and written in later medieval Britain (Latin French Old Norse Welsh Cornish English Dutch and Hebrew) this collection reveals the linguistic situation of the period in its true diversity and shows the resourcefulness of medieval people when faced with the need to communicate. For medieval writers and readers the ability to move between languages opened up a wealth of possibilities: possibilities for subtle changes of register for counterpoint for linguistic playfulness and perhaps most importantly for texts which extend a particular challenge to the reader to engage with them.

This volume presents the first comprehensive overview of the major early historical narratives created in Northern East-Central and Eastern Europe between c. 1070 and c. 1200 with each chapter providing a short introduction to the narrative in question. Most chapters are written by established experts in their fields who have published critical editions of the discussed narratives their English translations or analytical works dealing with early history writing in corresponding regions. However the volume is more than just a summary of various narratives. Despite being written in such different languages as Latin Old Norse and Old Church Slavonic these narratives played similar roles for their reading audiences in that they were crucial in the construction of Christian identity in the lands recently converted to Christianity. The thirteen authors contemplate the extent to which this identity formation affected the nature of narrativity in these early historical works. The authors ask how the pagan past and Christian present were incorporated in the texture of the narratives and address the relative importance of classical and biblical models for their composition and structure. By addressing such questions the volume offers medievalists a coherent comparative study of early history writing in the peripheral regions of medieval Europe in the first centuries after conversion.

Love play or playing dead wordplay or playing games - the notion of play inhabits all spheres of human activity. This collection of essays brings together international scholars from a range of disciplines to explore aspects of playfulness in the later European Middle Ages. From manuscript to performance and from the domestic to the doctrinal the exuberance and ambiguity of verbal and visual play is interrogated in order to decode layers of meaning in texts and artefacts. These twelve papers celebrate the work of Elaine C. Block whose dedicated study of misericords has through countless articles and books made the riches of this dizzying iconographic resource easily available to scholars for the first time. Her monumental Corpus on Medieval Misericords volumes will no doubt inform medieval scholars for generations to come and those included in the present collection are both proud and grateful to be of the first generation to benefit from her work on this body of carvings which challengingly - and playfully - straddles thesometimes invisible line between the sacred and profane.