Shaping Religious Identity on the Northern Edge of the Christianitas: Portraits of Pagans and Idolaters in the Twelfth Century Pomerania (original) (raw)
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The beginnings of Christianity in Pomerania
In: The Dawning of Christianity in Poland and across Central-Eastern Europe: History and the Politics of Memory, eds. I. Kąkolewski, Ch. Lübke, P. Urbańczyk, (= Polish Studies - Transdisciplinary Perspectives 26), Berlin 2020, 91-109., 2020
This chapter discusses the earliest traces of Christianity's spread into Pomerania (Pomorze) during the two centuries before a lasting Church organization was finally built in the 12th c. As evidenced through archaeological finds, already in the late 10th /early 11th c. do we observe an erosion of the traditional sepulchral behaviors and the appearance of new grave and burial-site forms among the Slavic Pomeranians. This phenomenon might be associable with the stronger penetration of Christianity into this region, i.a., during the short-lived conquest of Pomerania by the Piasts at the end of the 10th c. Moreover, the rhythm of economic development in the early-urban residential merchant settlements in this Baltic region, ones which functioned in the pre-state (tribal) period, implied a regular arrival of merchants, including Christian ones. In contrast to the early-Piast monarchy, the penetration of Christianity into Pomerania before the 12th c. was not supported by powerful structures of centralized power.
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Lithuanian Historical Studies, 2014
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Studia Mythologica Slavica, 2001
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2020
The article is dedicated to the problem of determination of geographical frames of the missionary activity of Wiching, the Bishop of Nitra, after his ordination in Rome by the Pope John VIII in 880. Based on the cross-analysis of the hagiographical texts, epistolary sources and other narratives of the late 9th – the first half of the 10th century, as well as some individual archaeological evidences, the author tries to reconstruct the nature of the church-political relations between the state of the Great Moravian prince Sviatopluk and the neighboring gentes in the last quarter of the 9th century and to determine, who was that “neophita gens” (mentioned in the letter of the Bavarian episcopate to the Pope John IX) to whom, by the will of Sviatopluk and the Pope John VIII, the newly ordained Bishop Wiching went on a mission. Despite the fact that the population of the territories, newly conquered or incorporated by the Great Moravian prince, was not always pagan or neophyte, Sviatop...
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Networks and Neighbours, 2013
For the early Christians the pagans were all around them: however much the Christians saw the pagans as different, they came from the same families, lived in the same cities, and were subject to the same government. The Otherness of the pagan was thus defined in terms of spiritual blindness or, in the martyr acts, cruelty. While the pagans were outsiders to the Christian community, they all, pagan and Christian, lived within a single Empire, and to some extent shared a single classical culture. With the Christianisation of the state, perspectives began to change, though the changes were complex, and until the eighth century pagans in our sources are likely to be close neighbours of the Christians, meaning that it was difficult to present them as totally alien: rather they were marginal figures who might be no more different than other awkward members of society. Towards the end of the eighth century, however, the pagan came to be more obviously the 'Outsider', defined increasingly as the Outsider to the Carolingian empire. In the ninth century, as the expansion of the Carolingian empire brought the Franks into greater contact with hitherto little-known areas, this would lead to a very complex debate about Otherness, which would only be halted in the North by the emergence of the Viking threat, which led to the emergence of a simplistic (though equally manipulated) image of the heathen-a destructive force, albeit one that might also be seen as the agent of divine wrath. Something of the complexity of the mid-ninth century debate, however, would continue in discourse about 1 This is a version of a paper given to Hans-Werner Goetz's seminar in Hamburg on 9th January 2010. 2 IAN WOOD Networks and Neighbours Slavonic paganism, especially in the writings of Bruno of Querfurt. Perhaps because the Slavs were increasingly familiar to Christian missionaries, descriptions of their religious practices, which are far more revealing than anything we have for the Germanic peoples, appear to be remarkably factual, especially in the writings of Helmold of Bosau. 2 The most exotic description of pagan cult in the late eleventh century does not, in fact, concern Slavonic paganism, but rather cult in what ought by then to have been the relatively familiar world of central Scandinavia. Adam of Bremen's depiction of pagan cult at Uppsala (which, after all, is not far from the Christian centre of Sigtuna) is so out-of-line with every other indication of pagan practice in the region, that it would seem to be a fantasy-and one for which archaeology has found no basis, with the result that it has even been suggested that the account is a parody of the practice of Christians who, as supporters of Gregory VII, were in conflict with Hamburg-Bremen. 3 This is not an interpretation that has met with much support, but it is undoubtedly the case that the image of pagan Uppsala presented in the writings of Adam of Bremen is, as we shall see, very different from the much more nuanced picture of paganism in our earlier sources. My argument begins, however, in the fourth and fifth centuries. Of course the transformation of the Roman Empire into a Christian State was not instantaneous, and the very fact that it was followed by the dissolution of the western Empire and the establishment of the successor states complicated the picture of the pagan. Most of the barbarians were converted to Christianity, albeit a heretical variety, Arianism, prior to the end of imperial rule. Interestingly their Arianism is often unremarked, except where it led to conflict with Roman Christians. The religious position of the Franks, the group that remained pagan longest, is equally unremarked in our contemporary sources, although Avitus of Vienne praises Clovis for his wisdom in convertingalbeit the final stage of Clovis' conversion was probably from a position of being an Arian sympathiser. 4 It is not until Gregory of Tours, writing three-quarters of a century after Clovis' conversion that we are presented with an image of the pagan Franks, in an extraordinary 2 See the edition by H. Stoob, Helmold von Bosau. Slawenchronik (Darmstadt, 2002).
“The Construction of Christian Identity in Fourteenth-Century Gdansk.” Historica 1(2015): 1-16.
The article studies the dynamics of the construction of a Christian image in fourteenth-century Gdańsk, as manifested in architecture, urban space, and artwork. This study demonstrates that the city’s Christian image was not only formed by the Teutonic Knights, a Christian military order that governed Gdańsk during this time, but by many social groups representing all strata of the city’s residents, sometimes supported by external powers, in the process of negotiating social and urban statuses. Consequently, the city’s architecture, urban space, and artwork were not only an expression of religious beliefs or of a particular artistic style, but also a manifestation of social, economic, and political identities.
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New Researches on the religion and mythology of the Pagan Slavs, red. P. Lajoye, 2019
Research on the religions of pagan Slavs is extremely difficul topic. This is mainly due to the limited (but contrary to appearances, not so limited as well) and the one-sided character of written sources as also the significance of archeological data. Amongst the latter, sculptures identified as idols deserve our special attention. Unfortunately, just a small number of these objects have a clear archaeological context. Most of them is known from accidental discoveries, including the 19th century. In the case of Poland the 19th century was a period of state and national identity crisis. All of this was the reason for searching for the so-called Slavic Antiquities. Programmatically, they were to legitimize the rights to Polish lands and to testify its cultural autonomy. Therefore, it needs especially cautious to approach the findings from this period because not all of them could be authentic, not all came from the early Middle Ages and finally not all could be regard as pagan idols. The aim of the author’s considerations is to analise available information about the findings of sculptures considered as idols that have been found so far in the area of Pomerania (Northern Poland). An analysis, which aim to answer the question, which of those representations could serve as visualisation of deities or other supernatural beings.
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