Review: Haraldur Hreinsson, Force of Words: A Cultural History of Christianity and Politics in Medieval Iceland (11th-13th Centuries) (original) (raw)
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The Cult of Saints and Legitimization of Elite Power in East Central and Northern Europe up to 1300, 2024
The volume presented here is the result of a collaborative effort. Initially, it was a collaboration among a group of researchers who participated in the conference 'The Cult of Saints and Legitimization of Elite Power in East Central Europe and Scandinavia until 1300', held at the University of War saw on 8 and 9 November 2021, and organized by the editors. This event provided an opportunity for researchers not only to present their own work but also to exchange ideas and engage in stimulating discussions. We are especially grateful to these researchers for their willingness to consider our perspectives and suggestions during the subsequent editorial stages, as we sought to ensure that the volume was coherent. However, none of this would have been possible without the preexisting collaboration between the editors and the institutions they rep resent: the Faculty of History at the University of Warsaw and the De partment of Archaeology, Conservation, and History at the University of Oslo. This collaboration was established within the framework of the joint project titled 'Symbolic Resources and Political Structures on the Pe riphery: Legitimization of ELITES in Poland and Norway, c. 1000-1300', of which this volume is one of the outcomes. The ELITES project has received funding from the Norwegian Financial Mechanism 2014-2021 (2019/34/H/HS3/00500). The Norway grants funded the Warsaw con ference and have also, together with the University of Warsaw, enabled this volume's open access publication. Moreover, while we invited numerous researchers to collaborate, the volume also includes chapters by members of the ELITES team, who present the results of research funded by the Norwegian Financial Mechanism 2014-2021 as part of our project. We express our profound gratitude to the Norway grants for their tremendous support. We extend our gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers of our volume, not only for their kindness but also for their valuable advice, comments, and corrections. For the same we are also grateful to Warren Brown, who shepherded the book on behalf of Brepols. We would also like to thank Rosie Bonté and the entire Brepols team for their excellent cooperation, as well as the two series editors, Louisa Taylor, and Hans Jacob Orning, who oversaw the entire process and did quite a bit of work. Finally, we appreciate Sarah Thomas for her outstanding, professional proofreading and copy-editing. © FHG Haraldur Hreinsson • is Assistant Professor in the history of the Christian religion and religious studies at the University of Iceland. His research interests include the cultural history of the political and the study of historical secularities. He has recently published Force of Words: A Cultural History of Christianity and Politics in Medieval Iceland (11th-13th cts.), Northern World, 90 (Leiden: Brill, 2021).
Seeking Salvation: Christianity and Conflict in Thirteenth-Century Iceland
2017
This paper focuses on the literary functions of various figures, Thorvald the Far-Traveled, Njal Thorgeirsson, and Hoskuld Thrainsson the Godi of Hvitanes. Particular emphasis is placed on the behavior of these figures when in the presence of conflict, primarily in thirteenth-century texts such as Brennu-Njáls saga and Þorvalds þáttur víðförla. Despite representing only a small portion of a vast genre, these works will help to introduce the possibilities of thirteenth-century authorship in formulating new social and cultural ideals, particularly around Christianity. Further studies will need to be made in order to obtain a fuller understanding of such possibilities, but this paper should provide a step towards such a direction.
Chapter 4 Approaching Contested Religion
Contesting Religion, 2018
Religion has become amatter of intensified public concern in contemporary Scandinavia, and the various media are the main arena in which Scandinavians encounter such controversies. Historically-rooted understandingso fr eligion that are basedo nt he Lutheran Church as both ap ublic utility and culturalr esource,a nd the secular state as the regulator of religious freedom and equality,h aveb ecome re-articulated in newlye merging frames such as the politicization, culturalization and securitizationo fr eligion. This chapter presents the current volume'so verall approach to religion in contemporary Scandinavia as amediatizedand contested social phenomenon. The chapter advocates aperspective from which ongoing contestations and negotiations among alargerspectrum of actors are explored through an application of both substantive and moderate social constructionist approaches to religion. The various applications and interplays of these approaches to religion mayf ruitfullyc ontribute to the furtherd evelopment of the theory of the mediatization of religion.
Review of Christianity, Empire and the Spirit: (Re)Configuring Faith and the Cultural
AAR's Reading Religion , 2022
The goal of Néstor Medina's Christianity, Empire and the Spirit: (Re)configuring Faith and the Cultural is to show the complex dynamics of cultural processes and their crucial role in understanding and living out the Christian faith. Essential to the project is Medina's critique of what he deems to be a problematic, narrow, modernist, and Eurocentric concept of "culture," to the point that he thinks the term is "becoming increasingly unsustainable" (5). As an alternative, Medina offers "the cultural" to emphasize the rich, complex, changeable, unfinished/open-ended, dynamic, contested, fluid, and interconnected processes of culturalization (6). In his own words, this book is an attempt to "retrieve the role of the cultural in understandings of human existence, especially its pivotal role in the historical development of Christianity, and including the theological articulation of the relationship between Christianity and the cultural" (6-7).
This article explores the entanglements between the emergence of the anthropological conception of religion and the logic of race in the modern/colonial world. This entanglement is also one between tradi- tional religious categories such as Christian, Muslim, and Jew, and modern ethno-racial designations such as white, indigenous, and black that point to a co-implication between race and what we call religion in modernity. Key in this process was the distinction between peoples with religion and groups without religion in the period of the late Middle Ages and early European expansion. Particularly important in this context are not only religious figures and theologians, but also travelers and conquistadors like Christopher Columbus and others.