The Arctic in the middle ages

The rather sparse and dubious data about Arctic regions known to Antiquity were taken over, mostly via Pliny, by the middle ages and reinforced and expanded in significant ways. This paper, which was delivered as an Inaugural Lecture at the University of Groningen in November 1982, reviews the activities and reports of medieval explorers, colonists and traders in or about the Arctic and considers the handful of medieval writers who display some real knowledge about Arctic regions. The generality of medieval writers on history and geography knew little or nothing. Even so, it is shown that here and there references are made to many of the features which are thought of as typically Arctic in the modern popular consciousness, with the exception of igloos and muskoxen. Commercial connections with the Arctic through Novgorod and Bergen are examined, and some account given of contacts with Iceland and the disappearance of the Norse settlement in Greenland. Polar bears and white falcons in western Europe, both of nearly indisputable Arctic origin, are discussed, attention is drawn to the very inadequate portrayal of the Arctic on medieval maps, and the paper closes with a glance at Olaus Magnus's account of northern peoples published in 1555.     

Papal Power and Protection in the Shebet Yehudah

The sixteenth‐century Shebet Yehudah is an account of the persecutions of Jews in various countries and epochs, including their expulsion from Spain in the fifteenth century. It is not a medieval text and was written long after many of the events it describes. Yet although it cannot give us a contemporary medieval standpoint, it provides important insights into how later Jewish writers perceived Jewish–papal relations in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Although the extent to which Jewish communities came into contact either with the papacy as an institution or the actions of individual popes varied immensely, it is through analysis of Hebrew works such as the Shebet Yehudah that we are able to piece together a certain understanding of Jewish ideas about the medieval papacy as an institution and the policies of individual popes. This article argues that Jews knew only too well that papal protection was not unlimited, but always carefully circumscribed in accordance with Christian theology. It is hoped that it will be a scholarly contribution to our growing understanding of Jewish ideas about the papacy's spiritual and temporal power and authority in the Later Middle Ages and how this impacted on Jewish communities throughout medieval Europe.     

Between Medieval Continuities and Early Modern Change: Proto-industrialization and Consumption in the Southern Low Countries (1300–1800)

Abstract

This essay discusses two interrelated questions about historical change: in what sense did early modern industries differ from their medieval predecessors; and which elements explain the diverging historical dynamics of European proto-industrial regions? Also considered is the issue of how and why some regions succeeded in selling their products in growing markets, while others apparently failed. This essay also assesses four aspects which have influenced regional success or failure, and which at the same time differentiated seventeenth- and eighteenth-century production and consumption from the late medieval world: the new role of the state, the world economy, rural consumption, and the challenge of fashion. It examines the main changes occurring in these fields between roughly 1650 and 1800, distinguishing between different phases of development for different regions and arguing that some of the success or the failure of a region, and thus their developmental capacities, lay in the interaction with these four fields. Textile industries serve as case studies, with a focus on the Southern Netherlands and comparisons from France, the Dutch Republic, Germany and England.     

Voices from the sea ice: the reception of climate impact narratives

This paper argues that indigenous peoples' responses to climate change are better understood in relation to emerging notions of citizenship than to climate change crisis narratives. The latter, like development narratives, are often used to license the intervention of experts in debates about resource management and conservation. Dominant climate change narratives about the Arctic emphasise the power of global climate systems to threaten northern communities by situating them as being intrinsically ‘at risk’. These narratives envisage Arctic citizenship within very narrow parameters which have largely masked the voices of northern citizens. Definitions of ecosystem resilience, while providing a framework for comparing disparate cultural and ecological contexts, are predicated on avoiding systemic collapse. It is argued that such definitions heighten the sense of risk implicit in climate change impacts. This may ultimately impede the development of different aspects of civic participation by northern citizens with climate change policy opportunities. Policy responses across a range of diverse geographical contexts require new narratives that put communities back into the calculus of risk and decision-making. One way to be more critical about the language of climate change narratives is to evaluate the extent to which they can account for, and mitigate, growing inequalities of power and wealth. Studies in the historical reception of science narratives are proposed as a better approach for making grounded comparisons of the discursive strategies with which climate change narratives are made to work. This also helps to bridge discussions of climate change across regions like the Arctic and Africa, which share much in common, but are too often studied in isolation.     

The past in the middle ages

In spite of the great variety of historical writing in the middle ages it has often been maintained that certain attitudes to the past were held in common between 500 and 1500 A.D. A sort of medieval vision of the past has been conjured up which is alleged to have been providential, if not apocalyptic, universalizing, Christocentric and strongly periodized. Medieval ideas about the past, as expressed in a handful of well-known writers, including Bede, Caffaro, Otto of Freising, Matthew Paris and Ranulph Higden, are considered here particularly with reference to the structure of the past, namely how, if at all, it was thought of as divided into periods, and its content. God's role in human history, it is argued, was neglected in practice; it was not the Christian Church which provided the medieval ‘universal’ historian with his main subject matter, but classical Rome; it was Rome, too, which was his inspiration and supplied his models.     

The making of a monster: the historical image of William Rufus

Few writers, medieval or modern, have had much good to write about William Rufus, the second Norman king of England (1087–1100). Beginning in the twelfth century, chroniclers and historians have portrayed William as a cruel, grasping, and sacriligious ruler. This study traces the development of this unflattering historical image from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries and notes that the religious convictions which encouraged medieval churchmen to condemn Rufus were offset in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by a more political and anti-catholic approach to his reign. Beginning in the eighteenth century, however, historians abandoned this more flattering portrayal and returned once again to the evil image concocted by the monastic chroniclers.     

The making of a monster: the historical image of William Rufus

Few writers, medieval or modern, have had much good to write about William Rufus, the second Norman king of England (1087–1100). Beginning in the twelfth century, chroniclers and historians have portrayed William as a cruel, grasping, and sacriligious ruler. This study traces the development of this unflattering historical image from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries and notes that the religious convictions which encouraged medieval churchmen to condemn Rufus were offset in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by a more political and anti-catholic approach to his reign. Beginning in the eighteenth century, however, historians abandoned this more flattering portrayal and returned once again to the evil image concocted by the monastic chroniclers.     

Dental chipping: Contrasting patterns of microtrauma in inuit and European populations

While the study of dental wear has enjoyed wide popularity for over 100 years, dental chipping, or microfractures of the tooth crown, has received little attention. Observations on dental chipping in populations from the Arctic (St. Lawrence Island, Alaska) and Europe (medieval Norway and Spain) reveal patterns of microtrauma that provide insights into the dietary and tooth‐tool use behaviour of earlier populations. St. Lawrence Island Inuit, with an emphasis on consuming tough and frozen foods, in combination with extensive tooth‐tool use, exhibit a pattern of chipping that is characterised as ‘molar dominant’. The two European samples exhibit an ‘incisor‐dominant’ pattern but contrast markedly in frequencies, with medieval Norwegians showing significantly more chipping than medieval and post‐medieval Spanish. The systematic study of chipping promises to provide a new perspective on how populations used and/or abused their dentitions in earlier times. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Some remarks on ethnicity in medieval archaeology

Recent critiques of the culture‐historical approach to ethnicity have denounced the idea that archaeological cultures are ‘actors’ on the historical stage, playing the role that known individuals or groups have in documentary history. But the critique has gone as far as to claim that, because archaeologists supposedly have no access to the meaning of cultural traditions, medieval ethnicity cannot be studied by archeological means. Ethnicity should be banned from all discussions, if medieval archaeology is to make any progress in the future. The paper examines the theoretical malaise at the root of this scepticism verging on nihilism. The understanding of the archaeological record not as an imprint, but as a text allows for much learning about meaning in the past. Symbols, style and power are the key concepts that currently guide anthropological research on ethnicity as a ‘social construction of primordiality’. As several archaeological examples show, medieval ethnicity was a form of social mobilization used in order to reach certain political goals. Ethnic identity was built upon some pre‐existing cultural identity, in a prototypic manner.     

A new model for royal penance? Helgaud of Fleury's Life of Robert the Pious

This article studies the theme of penance in writings about early medieval kingship through a case study: in his eleventh-century vita of Robert the Pious, Helgaud of Fleury described how the king did penance for his incestuous marriage in terms taken directly from Ambrose's Apologia David . This article, therefore, examines the influence which Ambrose had both on Helgaud and on earlier writers on kingship.     

Noticeboard

Recent years have seen a marked growth of interest in Jewish medieval history. It is no longer considered tenable to study the history of the Latin West without taking some account of the place of the Jews in medieval Europe. This article explores different trends in recent research on medieval Jewish-Christian coexistence by examining a number of books and editions of texts which have been published in this field since 1990.     

L’ars Dictaminis Entre Enseignement et Pratique (XIIe–XIVe Siècle)

The medieval discipline of the ars dictaminis (or dictamen), which flourished during the 12(th)-14(th) centuries, can be considered as an adaptation of classical Latin rhetoric to the communicational needs of the medieval society. Yet, although the relation between the teaching of the ars and its practice is an important one, it has rarely been addressed because of the persistence of numerous misunderstandings about the various different levels at which the ars was taught. This article offers some suggestions to fill this gap.     

Excavations at Dorestad,Vol. 1: The Harbour: Hoogstraat I. By W. A. Van Es and W. J. H. Verwers

This paper collates some examples of nineteenth-century church ‘restoration’, with special reference to their effect on medieval wall-paintings, and seeks to trace the motivation behind them. Their hitherto insufficiently recognised influence on prevailing views about the subject-matter of medieval wall-paintings is also suggested.     

Trinovantum — the evolution of a legend

One aspect of that legendary ‘British history’ which was accepted as fact almost without question by historical writers until the early seventeenth century, and in popular and literary tradition much longer, was the story of the foundation of London, as Trinovantum or ‘New Troy’, by a group of exiled Trojans, long before the Roman conquest of Britain. In considering the relevance of this medieval story to the problems of London's actual origin, this paper traces its sources and development. Ambiguities in the Latin of Julius Caesar and Orosius led later writers, including probably Bede, to assume that there had once existed a British city called Trinovantum. The British writers, represented by Nennius, invented a Trojan origin for their people on well-tried models. These two independent traditions were combined in the twelfth century by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who identified Trinovantum as Troia Nova, and made the further identification of this city with London. Later Londoners-were well aware of this ‘Trojan foundation’, and found in the story a source of pride and a reason for the pre-eminence of their city.     

The ‘Injunction of Jeremiah’: papal politicking and power in the Middle Ages

Throughout the Middle Ages, the ‘Injunction of Jeremiah’ (Jer. 1:10) was employed by countless ecclesiastical writers. Building on an established tradition, medieval contemporaries began applying the allegory of ‘uprooting and destroying, building and planting’ with an intentionally moral and political message. This article examines the Old Testament call narrative with a view to understanding how and why it served medieval popes and other high-ranked ecclesiastics as a political and rhetorical mechanism for legitimising ecclesiastical authority. It argues for a noticeable and deliberate shift in textual interpretation in the ninth century, after which period medieval popes and influential church figures alike marshalled the Injunction to help strengthen the centralising ideology of Rome and her bishop. The effect, it is concluded, contributed ultimately to reinforcing the papacy's claims to govern spiritual and temporal matters throughout Christian society.     

Geopolitics and the Northern Sea Route

Experimental transit voyages along the Northern Sea Route to the north of Russia are breaking new ground each year and the route is already significant for the export of raw materials from Russian ports. National and corporate interests are now driving Russia's Arctic policy, rather than, as formerly, an exclusive focus on security, and the Russian government has ambitious plans for the development of the route. Future regular transit of the Northern Sea Route between Europe and Asia, at present facing serious obstacles, could be accelerated not only by climate change, but by overload on, or interruptions to, the existing route through the Suez Canal, which passes through some of the world's most volatile regions. Despite the formidable impediments to regular year round transit of the Northern Sea Route, governments of the non‐Arctic states with most at stake, particularly Germany and China, appear to be taking no chances, and to be jockeying for influence in the Arctic region. The interests of the non‐Arctic trading states, and of the European Union, more inclined to view the Arctic Ocean as part of the ‘common heritage of mankind’, are however potentially different from those of Russia, and indeed of Canada in respect of the North East passage, both determined to maintain their exclusive national jurisdiction over emerging sea lanes through their territorial waters. Great issues are at stake here. The emergence of new sea lanes has historically impacted heavily on the international balance of power. Where the merchant fleets go, navies will shortly follow.     

Constantine,Helena, Maximus: on the appropriation of Roman history in medieval Wales,c.800–1250

This article explores the ways in which the three fourth-century figures, Constantine the Great (d. 337), St Helena (d. c.330) and Magnus Maximus (d. 388), were represented in texts produced in, or connected with, medieval Wales. The texts concerned may be described as genealogical, hagiographical or literary, and were written in either Latin or Welsh between about 800 and 1250. They include, amongst others, the ninth-century Historia Brittonum, Geoffrey of Monmouth's De gestis Britonum, and the vernacular prose tale Breudwyt Maxen Wledic. It is argued that the appropriation of the fourth-century figures occurred in a more limited number of contexts than has previously been supposed. Moreover, the evidence indicates that writers responsible for composing or redacting texts about these figures were far more likely to turn to earlier written texts for information on their subjects than to any contemporary oral traditions.     

ARCHAEOLOGY, ECONOMICS AND EARLY MEDIEVAL EUROPE

This paper assesses the contribution Richard Hodges has made to the archaeological study of the early medieval economy. After a review of methodology, three themes are considered: reciprocal exchange; the emporia; and regions and markets. The nature of exchange may be more complex, and more difficult to characterise, than Hodges allows. It is argued that the role of the king in exchange has been exaggerated, particularly with regard to Dorestad, while the extent to which inland regions and inland ports were involved in exchange may have been underestimated; this has led to a false appreciation of the emporia. Further work is needed to characterise the economy of the regions of early medieval Europe.