Where the Middle Ages Begin
Time and again the Beowulf poet’s choice of words and details reveals that he practised his craft within a tradition in which his creativeness was bound and disciplined by the objectiveness of a particular structure of images. We perceive in all the rich variety of his work the unifying effect of the typological imagination. It is in the typological mode of Beowulf that the key to its meaning and artistry is to be found.
Stonehenge, by the 11th century, lay on the border of two administrative districts known as hundreds, and many scholars have argued that it marked an important territorial boundary even earlier. It would have been a site known to everyone in the region but inhabited by no one.
Little by little, out of the old conviction —pagan and Christian— of evil interference in atmospheric phenomena evolved the belief that some people may use malign sorcery to set off whirlwinds hail, frosts, floods and other destructive weather events.
The paper aims at presenting an interpretation of the changes in ritualsagainst the background of the general political and social transformation witnessed by the early Polish state between the 10th and 12th centuries.
In order to establish the role of horses in the pre-Christian religions of Anglo-Saxon England, Viking-Age Scandinavia and other Germanic regions in mainland Europe, this dissertation will look for evidence of burial, sacrifice and other rituals involving horses in both archaeological and literary sources
Medieval and Renaissance controversies over the Aristotelian doctrine of “the eternity of the world” have hitherto been treated as disputes restricted to natural philosophers and theologians.
My reflections are part of a broad stream of inquiries into the world of medieval rituals which has proved to be very fertile during the last two decades, but which also has its limits. For more than twenty years now, medievalists have discovered and analysed the importance of personal relationships for the organization of societies before the existence of states in a modern sense of the word.
Examining the conversion of the kingdom of Mercia from the perspective of that kingdom’s origins and development and its rulers’ interests and concerns will enable us to understand both resistance and conversion to Christianity in seventh-century England.
What I am really going to be talking about throughout these lectures is stories, the power of stories, and the role that narrative played in the life of the Vikings, its influence on their perception of the world in which they understood themselves to move.
These centuries of tension and adaptation provide the evidence for the interaction of Christianity and Celtic religions, but one must use caution when examining Celtic religion because of potentially biased evidence.
In this paper, I want to look at the legend of St George and at possible pagan and pre-Christian sources for the legend, as well as some of the other literary descendants that may be associated with him.
How did the believers of the Old Norse religion perceive other religions, and to what extent did people from the outside get in contact with myths and rituals?
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.
Arguably one of the biggest changes in how the Picts portrayed themselves is understood through their use of sculpture. The earliest is thought to date to around the fifth century (Historic Scotland, 2012) lending itself to the Class I typology.
In this essay I will attempt to understand the motives behind the portrayals of Hakon jarl and other heathen characters in several sagas and to decipher the symbolic meaning of some literary depictions of heathen ritual.
The essay will attempt to determine the origin of the cult of Woden and also to explore the functions, history and patterns of Woden’s inclusion in royal genealogies.
This is the first paper from the Haskins Conference at Boston College – it focused on Bede’s narratives of Royal conversion.
In medieval Europe belief in monsters allowed for corresponding acceptance of the possibility of humans transforming into monsters. In medieval Iceland and Anglo-Saxon England the mixture of Christian and pagan world views and beliefs create a situation where the boundaries are not merely fluid but can be transgressed, in either direction.
The ever-evolving, interconnectedness of culture, religion, and superstition make for a truly unique theatrical experience in the middle ages. With limited understanding and access to scripture, medieval Christians generated a blended belief system, in order to make sense of the metaphysical world, which manifests itself in medieval drama‟s representations of Satan.
Some spooktacular reads to celebrate Medieval Halloween!
While Chaucer‟s knight has traveled to and fought in Spain, North Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia Minor, Sir John claims to have visited the entire known world from Constantinople and the Holy Land to the farthest reaches of Asia.
Special individuals capable of understanding the language of birds are spread throughout the medieval Icelandic literary corpus. This phenomenon has received surprisingly little academic attention and is deserving of detailed, extensive, and interdisciplinary study. Capable of flight and song, birds universally hold a special place in human experience. Their effective communication to people in Old Norse lore offers another example of their unique role in humanity’s socio-cosmic reality.
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.
From the first through the fourteenth centuries, a succession of solutions to the problem of these virtuous pagans evolved. For the Early Church, an attractive solution was that Christ descended into Hell to convert the souls he found there.
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