In The Church in Fourteenth-Century Iceland, Erika Sigurdson provides a history of the fourteenth-century Icelandic Church with a focus on the the social status of elite clerics following the introduction of benefices to Iceland. In this period, the elite clergy developed a shared identity based in part on universal clerical values, but also on a shared sense of interdependence, personal networks and connections within the framework of the Church. The Church in Fourteenth-Century Iceland examines the development of this social group through an analysis of bishops’ sagas, annals, and documents. In the process, it chronicles major developments in the Icelandic Church after the reforms of the late thirteenth century, including its emphasis on property and land ownership, and the growth of ecclesiastical bureaucracy.

This book explores the life and times of Jón Halldórsson, bishop of Skálholt (1322–39), a Dominican who had studied the liberal arts and canon law in Paris and Bologna, and provides a snapshot with wider implications for understanding of medieval literacy.

This book provides an overview of medieval monasticism in Iceland, from its dawn to its downfall during the Reformation. Blending the evidence from material remains and written documents, Monastic Iceland highlights the realities of everyday life in the male and female monasteries operated in Iceland. The book describes the incorporation of monasticism into the Icelandic society, the alleged land of the Vikings, and thus how the monasteries coexisted with the natural and social environments on the island while keeping their general aims and objectives. The book shows that large social systems, such as monasticism, can cross social and natural borders without necessitating fundamental changes apart from those triggered by the constant coexistence of nature and culture inside the environment they exist within. The evidence provided debunks the myth that Icelandic monasteries, male or female, were isolated, silent places or simple cells functioning principally as retirement homes for aristocrats. To be a member of an ecclesiastical institution did not mean a quiet, secluded life without any outside interaction, but rather active participation in the surrounding community. The book is for researchers in archaeology, osteology, and medieval history, in addition to all those interested in monasticism and the medieval history of northern Europe.

With its expanding legal system and its burgeoning throngs of lawyers, legates, and documents, the papacy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries has often been credited with spearheading a governmental revolution that molded the high medieval church into an increasingly disciplined, uniform, and machine-like institution. Reimagining Christendom offers a fresh appraisal of these developments from a surprising and distinctive vantage point. Tracing the web of textual ties that connected the northern fringes of Europe to the Roman see, Joel D. Anderson explores the ways in which Norse writers recruited, refashioned, and repurposed the legal principles and official documents of the Roman church for their own ends. Drawing on little-known vernacular sagas, Reimagining Christendom is populated with tales of married bishops, fictitious and forged papal bulls, and imagined canon law proceedings. These narratives, Anderson argues, demonstrate how Norse writers adapted and reconfigured the institutional power of the church in order to legitimize some of the thoroughly abnormal practices of their native bishops. In the process, Icelandic clerics constructed their own visions of ecclesiastical order--visions that underscore the thoroughly malleable character of the Roman church's text-based government and that articulate diverse ways of belonging to the far-flung imagined community of high medieval Christendom.

The last fifty years have seen a significant change in the focus of saga studies, from a preoccupation with origins and development to a renewed interest in other topics, such as the nature of the sagas and their value as sources to medieval ideologies and mentalities. The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Sagas presents a detailed interdisciplinary examination of saga scholarship over the last fifty years, sometimes juxtaposing it with earlier views and examining the sagas both as works of art and as source materials. This volume will be of interest to Old Norse and medieval Scandinavian scholars and accessible to medievalists in general.

In the ninth century, at the beginning of this account, Iceland was uninhabited save for fowl and smaller Arctic animals. In the middle of the sixteenth century, by the end of this history, it had embarked on a course that led to the creation of a small country on the periphery of Europe. The history of medieval Iceland is to some degree a microcosm of European history, but in other respects it has a trajectory of its own. As in medieval Europe, the evolution of the Church, episodic warfare, and the strengthening of the bonds of government played an important role. Unlike the rest of Europe, however, Iceland was not settled by humans until the Middle Ages and it was without towns and any type of executive government until the late medieval period. Medieval Iceland is a review of Icelandic history from the settlement until the advent of the Reformation, with an emphasis on social and political change, but also on cultural developments, such as the creation of a particular kind of literature, known throughout the world as the sagas. A view of medieval Icelandic history as it has never been told before from one of its leading historians, this book will appeal to students and scholars alike interested in Icelandic and medieval history.

Medieval Iceland is known for the fascinating body of literary works it produced, from ornate court poetry to mythological treatises to sagas of warrior-poets and feud culture. This book investigates the institutions and practices of education which lay behind not only this literary corpus, but the whole of medieval Icelandic culture, religion, and society. By bringing together a broad spectrum of sources, including sagas, law codes, and grammatical treatises, it addresses the history of education in medieval Iceland from multiple perspectives. It shows how the slowly developing institutions of the church shaped educational practices within an entirely rural society with its own distinct vernacular culture. It emphasizes the importance of Latin, despite the lack of surviving manuscripts, and teaching and learning in a highly decentralized environment. Within this context, it explores how medieval grammatical education was adapted for bilingual clerical education, which in turn helped create a separate and fully vernacularized grammatical discourse.

Maríu saga, the Old Norse-Icelandic life of the Virgin Mary, survives in nineteen manuscripts. While the 1871 edition of the saga provides two versions based on multiple manuscripts and prints significant variants in the notes, it does not preserve the literary and social contexts of those manuscripts. In the extant manuscripts Maríu saga rarely exists in the codex by itself. This study restores the saga to its manuscript contexts in order to better understand the meaning of the text within its manuscript matrix, why it was copied in the specific manuscripts it was, and how it was read and used by the different communities that preserved the manuscripts.

In this first historical study of High-Medieval Iceland to be published in English, Dr Vesteinsson investigates the influence of the Christian Church on the formation of the earliest state structures in Iceland, from the conversion in 1000 to the union with Norway in 1262. In the history of mankind states and state structures have usually been established before the advent of written records. As a result historians are rarely able to trace with certainty the early development of complex structures of government. In Iceland, literacy and the practice of native history writing had been established by the beginning of the twelfth century; whereas the formation of a centralised government did not occur until more than a hundred years later. The early development of statelike structures has therefore been unusually well chronicled, in the Icelandic Sagas, and in the historical records of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Based on this wealth of material,The Christianization of Iceland is an important contribution to the discussion on the formation of states.

New Music of the Nordic Countries describes the music of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden composed during the latter half of the twentieth century. Along with providing biographical material on most of the living Nordic composers, the book discusses in detail the major trends in Scandinavian contemporary music as well as many of the recent musical works. The 800-page volume is edited by John D. White, a former Scholar to Iceland and a Fellow of the American-Scandinavian Foundation. White is the author of Part III, New Music in Iceland and has enlisted five other distinguished Nordic musical scholars to write the remaining sections of the book. Bound together philosophically, geographically, and to a significant extent ethnically, the five Nordic countries hold a unique place in today's world. They are populated by talented, creative achievers, and each nation possesses its own special qualities. This is certainly true in its music, yet little of Nordic tone art of the late twentieth century is widely known outside of Northern Europe. Thus, this comprehensive volume will serve a valuable purpose in disseminating knowledge about this important body of music literature.