As the discipline of medieval studies strives towards inclusivity, the examination of the borders of Christendom in the Middle Ages offers ample opportunities to weave local tradition into dominant conversion narratives. This edited volume, Faith and Knowledge in Late Medieval and Early Modern Scandinavia, focuses on the transmission of Christian epistemologies in the Far North, where Christian conversions occurred over a protracted period, from ca. 1000 to 1200.
The wide scope of the volume bridges both chronologies and geographies, which reveals how Christianity worked in a local context leading up to the “gentle” Lutheran Reformation in Scandinavia (defined as Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and Sweden). The contributors make a sustained argument that challenge the “Europeanization of Scandinavia” (22). Rather than placing emphasis on the continuities between Scandinavia and continental Europe, this volume contributes to the reception of Christian knowledge and learning from local perspectives. In this way, readers will gain an understanding that adaption and change during the process of conversion were not uniform, and could vary widely across Scandinavia’s expansive geography. Moreover, the book’s broad temporal framework attests to the need to look at both the medieval and early modern eras, which are traditionally divided in Scandinavian studies.
The introduction by Kjesrud and Males probes the relationship between “faith,” “knowledge,” and “truth” from Scandinavian literary sources: knowledge, as justified true belief, “presupposed faith and faith presupposed knowledge” (23). From this broad conceptual framework of “faith” and “knowledge,” the first chapter by Aksel Haaning foregrounds issues of interpreting patristic sources so far from Rome, or, as he puts it: “issues that arose when Christianity gradually reached the population of northern Europe who still followed pagan cults” (47). The remaining ten chapters trace local and Christian belief systems through the surviving written record, drawing from a range of Scandinavian literary sources, including Old Norse manuscripts (Karoline Kjesrud, Natalie M. Van Deusen and Kirsten Wolf), visions (Maria H. Oen), inventories (Margaret Cormack), ecclesiastical law (Elise Kleivane), poetry and poetic legends (Mikael Males, Martin Chase), magic (Stephen A. Mitchell, Alessia Bauer), and rune stone inscriptions (Matthew Norris). It is worth noting that all the chapters translate Old Norse, thereby breaking linguistic barriers that too frequently prevent non-Scandinavian scholars from embarking on medieval Scandinavian research.
Also, in terms of the book’s striving toward accessibility, several authors describe the surviving written source material at length, including the Norwegian Homily Book and Old Norse Icelandic manuscripts and fragments. For instance, Cormack’s authoritative chapter on máldagar (contracts and inventories) provides insight into Icelandic parish churches and their contents. The máldagar as a genre of extant sources is so important for those unfamiliar with the original source texts preserved in Iceland and with its the relationship of this genre to church art in Norway. Surviving visual artifacts from medieval Scandinavia certainly complement and extend such textual traditions, but obviously lie outside the literary scope of this book.
Of course, an implied aspect of medieval learning concerns access and authority. In other words, who was able to learn? To address who precisely gets to acquire knowledge in the Middle Ages, Oen’s meticulous chapter uses Birgitta of Sweden’s Revelations (Revelaciones) to make explicit the elite context of access to knowledge. Other chapters further distinguish between the elite and lay cultures in premodern Scandinavia. Kleivane argues that the laity in medieval Norway, for example, preferred Latin over the vernacular sources in sacred texts. As a consequence of paying attention to the differences between elite audiences and the laity, the reader also gains awareness of the topography of Scandinavia, its dioceses, parish churches, and monastic learning centers.
Another running strand throughout the book attempts to examine how knowledge was transferred. Kjesrud’s chapter quantitatively analyses Norse literary transmission of hagiographies, bishop’s sagas, and king’s sagas, revealing the changing rate of transmission of these three genres from ca. 1200 to 1550. Similarly, Van Deusen and Wolf overview the transmission of saints’ lives in Icelandic poetry over 900 years. For readers outside literary disciplines, though, the precise mechanics of transmission, as well as impact of contact and delay, remain unclear.
Faith and Knowledge in Late Medieval and Early Modern Scandinavia hinges on a Christian worldview, supported by Christian institutions of learning and power. This is evident in the inconsistent terminology for Scandinavian cultures prior to Christianity--“pagan,” “Nordic,” “pre-Christian” were used interchangeably, for instance. In addition, the absent voices of the Sámi and Finno-Ugric cultures in this volume belie the inherent multiculturalism of local traditions in medieval and early modern Scandinavia. Nonetheless, Faith and Knowledge, especially when paired with the recently-published Protracted Reformation in the North, edited by Sigrun Høgetveit Berg, Rognald Heisedal Bergesen, and Roald Ernst Kristiansen (De Gruyter, 2020), reveals the complex and changing histories of religious belief systems in Scandinavia that are thankfully becoming more accessible to international audiences.