In ‘Buried, Forgotten, Disinterred?: The 1944 National Socialist St. Olav Monument at Stiklestad’, Øystein Ekroll gave the audience a glimpse into a struggle going on in Norway as it deals with its Nazi past.
Buried, Forgotten, Disinterred?: The 1944 National Socialist St. Olav Monument at Stiklestad
July 17, 2015 By
The Anglo-Saxon War-Culture and The Lord of the Rings: Legacy and Reappraisal
January 18, 2015 By
The literature of war in English claims its origin from the Homeric epics, and the medieval accounts of chivalry and the crusades.
Flandria Illustrata: Flemish Identities in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period
November 23, 2014 By
This chapter discusses identity formation in early modern Flanders. It argues that policy makers and their intellectual agents transformed the perception of a province that had been divided by urban rivalries, civil war and conflicts with the Burgundian and Habsburg overlords, into a bastion of the Catholic Counter Reformation with strong ties to the Spanish King and his representatives.
Vikings, the barbaric heroes: exploring the Viking image in museums in Iceland and England and its impact on identity
October 6, 2014 By
This study analyses the responses of Icelandic and English individuals in regards to their views on the Viking image as represented within museums and in society.
The Floating State: Trade Embargoes and the Rise of a New Venetian State
October 1, 2014 By
This paper was given by Georg Christ and examined embargoes and state formation in the late medieval and early modern period in Venice.
Rose without Thorn, Eagle without Feathers: Nation and Power in Late Medieval England and Germany
September 28, 2014 By
It is hard at times to take the Agincourt Carol entirely seriously. Patriotism of such brash exuberance seems more properly to belong in a brightly lit Laurence Olivier world of mid twentieth-century medievalism than amid the grim and tangled realities of fifteenth- century politics and war.
ARTICLES: The Deflation of the Medieval in Joyce’s Ulysses
September 23, 2014 By
For James Joyce, Irish nationalism, with its appeal to patriotic emotionality and promotion of interest in the archaic and medieval Irish past, was suspect.
Extralegal and English: the Robin Hood Legend and Increasing National Identity in the Middling Sorts of Late Medieval England
September 15, 2014 By
The legend was clearly not the only work of popular culture in what I propose as the long fifteenth century, but it does serve as a very useful representation for examining the growth of Englishness.
Race, Periodicity, and the (Neo-) Middle Ages
August 25, 2014 By
My goal is to intervene in ongoing discussions of race and periodicity, particularly vis-à-vis medieval culture, in order to investigate the informing role of the medieval and more particularly of medievalisms in the construction, representation, and perpetuation of modern racisms.
Goths, Lombards, Romans, and Greeks: Creating Identity in Early Medieval Italy
July 16, 2014 By
This essay explores how two different non-Roman historians represented the past to their peoples: the Gothic historian Jordanes’ sixth-century work, the Getica, and the eighth-century Lombard historian Paul the Deacons’ History of the Lombards.
Quid Tacitus . . . ? The Germania and the Study of Anglo-Saxon England
June 6, 2014 By
This paper considers the vexed historiography of Tacitus’s Germania and its reception history, first among German and other European historians and then among Anglo-Saxonists.
The Process of State-Formation in Medieval Iceland
March 22, 2014 By
The aim of this article is to analyze the process of state-formation in Iceland in light of some general models of state-formation in Europe in the Middle Ages.
From Scott to Rispart, from Ivanhoe to The York Massacre of the Jews Rewriting and translating historical “fact” into fiction in the historical novel
November 23, 2013 By
From Scott to Rispart, from Ivanhoe to The York Massacre of the Jews Rewriting and translating historical “fact” into fiction in the historical novel Nitsa Ben-Ari Palimpsestes, 24 (2011) Abstract Historical “data” concerns not only facts, as we all know, but memory (individual as well as collective), language, cultural heritage (“real” or invented). In his […]
Biblical nationalism and the sixteenth-century states
November 4, 2013 By
Biblical nationalism was new because pre-Reformation Europeans encountered the Hebrew Bible through paraphrases and abridgments. Full-text Bibles revealed a programmatic nationalism backed by unmatched authority as the word of God to readers primed by Reformation theology to seek models in the Bible for the reform of their own societies.
The Liber Historiae Francorum – a Model for a New Frankish Self-confidence
August 7, 2013 By
The Liber Historiae Francorum – a Model for a New Frankish Self-confidence Philipp Dörler Networks and Neighbours, Volume One, Number One (2013) The Liber historiae Francorum was influenced by different historiographic traditions. In this paper, I pursue two arguments. First, I believe that the author of the Liber historiae Francorum juxtaposes and slightly transforms these […]
The Territorial Strategy of the Italian City-State
July 24, 2013 By
How did Europe move from a medieval system characterised by several overlapping territorial strategies, to one dominated by a single, territorially exclusive model of rule?
Sovereignty and Territoriality: An Essay in Medieval Political Theory
December 17, 2012 By
To advance this task of conceptual clarification, my essay offers an excursus into medieval political theory. It argues that sovereignty, as the idea is used at present, has its genesis in a theological concept—it the notion of highest authority the archetype for which is God. But why invoke the medieval tradition to talk about all this?
Transylvanian Identities in the Middle Ages
November 25, 2012 By
Identity has become a subject of historical exploration as it is also one of the themes examined from the perspectives of various disciplines belonging to the social sciences such as sociology, psychology or anthropology.
Furor Teutonicus: The View of the ‘Germans’ in Italy during the Reign of Emperor Frederick I, ‘Barbarossa’ (1152-90)
November 19, 2012 By
“Medieval Europe did not love the Germans. The Italians hated them, the French admitted their courage, but detested their manners, the English were jealous of them, the Slavs both feared and hated them, while the Germans despised and contemned the Slavs.”16 But it is the Italian side I would like to concentrate on in this paper. Further, I do not wish to examine the reasons for the conflicts between ‘Germans’ and ‘Italians’ in this era, nor the events surrounding them. I will try to focus strictly on the views that were expressed about Germans in mediaeval Italy in general and during the reign of Frederick Barbarossa in particular.
Britain’s Medieval identity Crisis
November 14, 2012 By
Clare Downham considers how a set of saints’ lives written by a13th century monk in Cumbria help us understand how national allegiances were understood in medieval Britain.
Sacrilege, Sacrifice and John Barbour’s Bruce
October 13, 2012 By
The narrative accomplished on this plane is critical to the foundation, or re-foundation, of royal order after a usurpation, yet it is more than a dynastic expedient;3 rather, it is a story that, even as it bridges the gaps in credibility and legitimacy attendant upon a new royal line, primally reinforces the governing fictions of kingship as an institution.
Robert Bruce’s Bones: reputations, politics and identities in nineteenth-century Scotland
October 13, 2012 By
‘We, on the whole, do our Hero-worship worse than any other Nation in this world ever did it before.’ Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881).
The Holy Roman Empire, the Schmalkald League, and the Idea of Confessional Nation-Building
October 12, 2012 By
Recent research on nationalism draws a fundamental heuristic distinc- tion between political and cultural nationalism. Scholars define the his- torian’s task as the analysis of political and cultural nationalism in each historic context.
‘Nation’ Consciousnesses in Medieval Ireland
September 28, 2012 By
A unified sovereignty never came into existence in Ireland throughout the middle ages. Nevertheless, the native inhabitants of this island have been reported as being of one nation in several different documents since the seventh century.
King Pedro IV of Aragon, royal propaganda and the tradition of royal speechwriting
August 15, 2012 By
In the archives of the Crown of Aragon in Barcelona is preserved the autograph manuscript of a speech against the rebellion of the Judge of Arborea in Sardinia made by King Pedro IV of Aragon to open the corts, probably that held in Sant Mateu, Valencia in 1369.
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