Isolated Islands in Medieval Nature, Culture and Mind

Isolated Islands in Medieval Nature, Culture and Mind PDF Author: Gerhard Jaritz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description

Isolated Islands in Medieval Nature, Culture and Mind

Isolated Islands in Medieval Nature, Culture and Mind PDF Author: Gerhard Jaritz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


Isolated Islands in Medieval Nature, Culture and Mind

Isolated Islands in Medieval Nature, Culture and Mind PDF Author: Gerhard Jaritz
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 6155053251
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
Focuses specifically on the concept and role of islands in the medieval world. The main characteristic of an island is, of course, that of being isolated from the rest of the world; in geography by waters, in more abstract and symbolic meanings by other kinds of separating borders. Islands were the place 'on the other side', of difference, otherness and remoteness. As one of the articles in this volume puts it, islands are often depicted "as sites for extraordinary events and happenings".

Northern Atlantic Islands and the Sea

Northern Atlantic Islands and the Sea PDF Author: Andrew Jennings
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443892688
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Orkney, Shetland and, to some extent, the Hebrides, share both a Nordic cultural and linguistic heritage, and the experience of being surrounded by the ever-present North Atlantic Ocean. This has been a constant in the islanders’ history, forging their unique way of life, influencing their customs and traditions, and has been instrumental in moulding their identities. This volume is an exploration of a rich, intimate and, at times, terrifying relationship. It is the result of an international conference held in April 2014, when scholars from across the North Atlantic rim congregated in Lerwick, Shetland, to discuss maritime traditions, islands in Old Norse literature, insular archaeology, folklore, and traditional belief. The chapters reflect the varied origins of the contributors. Icelanders are well represented, as are scholars based in Orkney and Shetland, indicating the strength of scholarship in these seemingly isolated archipelagos. Peripheral they may be to the UK, but they lie at the heart of the North Atlantic, at the intersection of British and Nordic cultures. This book will be of interest to scholars of a wide range of disciplines, such as those involved in island studies, cultural studies, Old Norse literature, Icelandic studies, maritime heritage, oceanography, linguistics, folklore, British studies, ethnology, and archaeology. Similarly, it will also appeal to researchers from a wide geographical area, particularly the UK, and Scandinavia, and indeed anywhere where there is an interest in the study of islands or the North Atlantic.

Islandology

Islandology PDF Author: Marc Shell
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804789266
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Islandology is a fast-paced, fact-filled comparative essay in critical topography and cultural geography that cuts across different cultures and argues for a world of islands. The book explores the logical consequences of geographic place for the development of philosophy and the study of limits (Greece) and for the establishment of North Sea democracy (England and Iceland), explains the location of military hot-spots and great cities (Hormuz and Manhattan), and sheds new light on dozens of world-historical productions whose motivating islandic aspect has not heretofore been recognized (Shakespeare's Hamlet and Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung). Written by Shell in view of the melting of the world's great ice islands, Islandology shows not only new ways that we think about islands but also why and how we think by means of them.

Images and Objects in Ritual Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Northern and Central Europe

Images and Objects in Ritual Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Northern and Central Europe PDF Author: Krista Kodres
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443864285
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
This multidisciplinary collection of essays explores the functions, meanings and use of images and objects in various late Medieval and Early Modern social practices, which were linked by their ritual character. The book approaches ‘ritual’ as an action which is discussed under the general umbrella term “performative practice”, and is characterised by a synthesis between the repetitive and the extraordinary that carries an intense symbolic meaning and is emotionally charged. Images, spaces and rituals were closely interconnected in both the religious and the secular spheres, and played a relevant role in the symbolic communication of the time. The essays in this volume are devoted to a complex study of these phenomena in Northern and Central Europe, including regions which, due to linguistic or cultural barriers, have thus far received comparatively little attention in Anglo-American scholarship, including Scandinavia, Poland and the Baltic states.

Between the Seas

Between the Seas PDF Author: Deborah Paci
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1838606211
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
In Between the Seas, Deborah Paci takes a comparative view of islandness in island identities through case studies of islands in the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas. These case studies primarily include, in the Baltic case, the Åland Islands, Gotland, Saaremaa, Hiiumaa and Ruhnu; and in the Mediterranean case, Sicily, Malta, Sardinia and Corsica. Examining multiple sites of these islands' identities such as history, environmental concerns and governance systems, this book provides a historical perspective into the relations between islands and the larger geopolitical regions around them, as well as historicizing 'insularist' rhetoric deployed by pro-independence groups within them. Paci examines the changing role and increasing political importance of islands in the European Union against the history of island insularity and offers a significant contribution to the wider field of island studies.

Old Norse Folklore

Old Norse Folklore PDF Author: Stephen A. Mitchell
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150177347X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
The medieval northern world consisted of a vast and culturally diverse region both geographically, from roughly Greenland to Novgorod and culturally, as one of the last areas of Europe to be converted to Christianity. Old Norse Folklore explores the complexities of thisfascinating world in case studies and theoretical essays that connect orality and performance theory to memory studies, and myths relating to pre-Christian Nordic religion to innovations within late medieval pilgrimage song culture. Old Norse Folklore provides critical new perspectives on the Old Norse world, some of which appear in this volume for the first time in English. Stephen A. Mitchell presents emerging methodologies by analyzing Old Norse materials to offer a better understandings ofunderstanding of Old Norse materials. He examines, interprets, and re-interprets the medieval data bequeathed to us by posterity—myths, legends, riddles, charms, court culture, conversion narratives, landscapes, and mindscapes—targeting largely overlooked, yet important sources of cultural insights.

Storied and Supernatural Places

Storied and Supernatural Places PDF Author: Ülo Valk
Publisher: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura
ISBN: 9522229946
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
This book addresses the narrative construction of places, the relationship between tradition communities and their environments, the supernatural dimensions of cultural landscapes and wilderness as they are manifested in European folklore and in early literary sources, such as the Old Norse sagas. The first section “Explorations in Place-Lore” discusses cursed and sacred places, churches, graveyards, haunted houses, cemeteries, grave mounds, hill forts, and other tradition dominants in the micro-geography of the Nordic and Baltic countries, both retrospectively and from synchronous perspectives. The supernaturalisation of places appears as a socially embedded set of practices that involves storytelling and ritual behaviour. Articles show, how places accumulate meanings as they are layered by stories and how this shared knowledge about environments can actualise in personal experiences. Articles in the second section “Regional Variation, Environment and Spatial Dimensions” address ecotypes, milieu-morphological adaptation in Nordic and Baltic-Finnic folklores, and the active role of tradition bearers in shaping beliefs about nature as well as attitudes towards the environment. The meaning of places and spatial distance as the marker of otherness and sacrality in Old Norse sagas is also discussed here. The third section of the book “Traditions and Histories Reconsidered” addresses major developments within the European social histories and mentalities. It scrutinizes the history of folkloristics, its geopolitical dimensions and its connection with nation building, as well as looking at constructions of the concepts Baltic, Nordic and Celtic. It also sheds light on the social base of folklore and examines vernacular views toward legendry and the supernatural.

Rulership in 1st to 14th century Scandinavia

Rulership in 1st to 14th century Scandinavia PDF Author: Dagfinn Skre
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110421151
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 573

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Book Description
This book seeks to revitalise the somewhat stagnant scholarly debate on Germanic rulership in the first millennium AD. A series of comprehensive chapters combines literary evidence on Scandinavia’s polities, kings, and other rulers with archaeological, documentary, toponymical, and linguistic evidence. The picture that emerges is one of surprisingly stable rulership institutions, sites, and myths, while control of them was contested between individuals, dynasties, and polities. While in the early centuries, Scandinavia was integrated in Germanic Europe, profound societal and cultural changes in 6th-century Scandinavia and the Christianisation of Continental and English kingdoms set northern kingship on a different path. The pagan heroic warrior ethos, essential to kingship, was developed and refined; only to recur overseas embodied in 9th–10th-century Vikings. Three chapters on a hitherto unknown masonry royal manor at Avaldsnes in western Norway, excavated 2017, concludes this volume with discussions of the late-medieval peak of Norwegian kingship and it’s eventual downfall in the late 14th century. This book’s discussions and results are relevant to all scholars and students of 1st-millenium Germanic kingship, polities, and societies.

Autoethnography and Feminist Theory at the Water's Edge

Autoethnography and Feminist Theory at the Water's Edge PDF Author: Sonja Boon
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319908294
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Book Description
This book takes an intimate, collaborative, interdisciplinary autoethnographic approach that both emphasizes the authors’ entangled relationships with the more-than-human, and understands the land and sea-scapes of Newfoundland as integral to their thinking, theorizing, and writing. The authors draw on feminist, trans, queer, critical race, Indigenous, decolonial, and posthuman theories in order to examine the relationships between origins, memories, place, identities, bodies, pasts, and futures. The chapters address a range of concerns, among them love, memory, weather, bodies, vulnerability, fog, myth, ice, desire, hauntings, and home. Autoethnography and Feminist Theory at the Water’s Edge will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including gender studies, cultural geography, folklore, and anthropology, as well as those working in autoethnography, life writing, and island studies.