Wojtek Jezierski is Full Professor of History at the Department of Historical Studies, University of Gothenburg. He defended his PhD at Stockholm University in 2010 and received his MA at the University of Warsaw in 2003.
What anxieties did medieval missionaries and crusaders face and what role did the sense of risk ... more What anxieties did medieval missionaries and crusaders face and what role did the sense of risk play in their community-building? To what extent did crusaders and Christian colonists empathize with the local populations they set out to conquer? Who were the hosts and who were the guests during the confrontations with the pagan societies on the Baltic Rim? And how were the uncertainties of the conversion process addressed in concrete encounters and in the accounts of Christian authors?
This book explores emotional bonding as well as practices and discourses of hospitality as uncertain means of evangelization, interaction, and socialization across cultural divides on the Baltic Rim, c. 1000–1300. It focuses on interactions between local populations and missionary communities, as well as crusader frontier societies. By applying tools of historical anthropology to the study of host-guest relations, spaces of hospitality, emotional communities, and empathy on the fronts of Christianization, this book offers fresh insights and approaches to the manner in which missionaries and crusaders reflexively engaged with the groups targeted by Christianization in terms of practice, ethics, and identity.
Can we think of a Benedictine cloister around the year 1000 as reminiscent of a modern prison or ... more Can we think of a Benedictine cloister around the year 1000 as reminiscent of a modern prison or a mental asylum? Was the monastery a medieval type of Erving Goffman's 'total institution' or Benthanian panopticon thoroughly structuring the thoughts and practices of its inmates? What did the power relations between the groups of monks in medieval St Gall look like? Wojtek Jezierski's thesis explores and expands the connection between the medieval forms of monastic life and modern social theories. It investigates the patterns of persecution and exclusion, the exercise of power and surveillance, as well as violent conflicts between the conventuals and their abbots. It analyzes also the social components of monastic habitus and subjectivity in the monasteries of St Gall, Fulda, Bury St Edmunds and others. Finally, the study examines the strategies monks used to cope with the demands made on them by the external lay world, i.e. the political, social, and cultural liaisons between claustrum and saeculum. Wojtek Jezierski (b. 1979) studied history and social anthropology the University of Warsaw. He conducts research at the Department of History and the centre for Medieval Studies, Stockholm University. This book is his PhD thesis.
Acta Poloniae Historica 129 (ISSN 2450-8462), 2024
This special issue investigates symbolic languages employed by religious and political elites in ... more This special issue investigates symbolic languages employed by religious and political elites in two peripheral polities, Poland and Norway, 1000-1300, with a particular focus on the politically legitimizing role and competitive use of such means. Scholarship on medieval peripheral elites, such as these from Scandinavia or East-Central Europe, has traditionally been investigated through the diffusionist paradigm of Europeanization (R. Bartlett), which focused on their relationship with the political and cultural centers (Western Europe, papacy, Byzantium etc.), passive adaptation to political culture, patterns of acculturation and integration, etc. Within their respective, nationally framed historiographies, the two polities during this period have been traditionally considered from the teleological perspective of centralistic and hierarchy-inducing state-building processes. In this issue, however, we turn the focus to the competitive symbolic languages of (self-)legitimization employed by these peripheral elites in the context of two polities, whose elements of order remained in flux or could be ranked in different, often shifting, and sometimes conflicting ways. By considering this problem through a comparative Norwegian and Polish case-studies this special issue studies the conditions and practical means of formation of elites and competition within them in two distinct polities facing similar challenges.
Reflecting debate around hospitality and the Baltic Sea region, this open access book taps into w... more Reflecting debate around hospitality and the Baltic Sea region, this open access book taps into wider discussions about reception, securitization and xenophobic attitudes towards migrants and strangers. Focusing on coastal and urban areas, the collection presents an overview of the responses of host communities to guests and strangers in the countries surrounding the Baltic Sea, from the early eleventh century to the twentieth. The chapters investigate why and how diverse categories of strangers including migrants, war refugees, prisoners of war, merchants, missionaries and vagrants, were portrayed as threats to local populations or as objects of their charity, shedding light on the current predicament facing many European countries. Emphasizing the Baltic Sea region as a uniquely multi-layered space of intercultural encounter and conflict, this book demonstrates the significance of Northeastern Europe to migration history.
This book explores the practical and symbolic resources of legitimacy which the elites of medieva... more This book explores the practical and symbolic resources of legitimacy which the elites of medieval Scandinavia employed to establish, justify, and reproduce their social and political standing between the end of the Viking Age and the rise of kingdoms in the thirteenth century. Geographically the chapters cover the Scandinavian realms and Free State Iceland. Thematically the authors cover a wide palette of cultural practices and historical sources: hagiography, historiography, spaces and palaces, literature, and international connections, which rulers, magnates, or ecclesiastics used to compete for status and to reserve haloing glory for themselves. The volume is divided in three sections. The first looks at the sacral, legal, and acclamatory means through which privilege was conferred onto kings and ruling families. Section II explores the spaces such as aristocratic halls, palaces, churches in which the social elevation of elites took place. Section III explores the traditional and novel means of domestic distinction and international cultural capital which different orders of elites-knights, powerful clerics, ruling families, etc.-wrought to assure their dominance and set themselves apart vis-à-vis their peers and subjects. A concluding chapter discusses how the use of symbolic capital in the North compared to wider European contexts.
Prior to the high Middle Ages, the Baltic Rim was largely terra incognita-but by the late Middle ... more Prior to the high Middle Ages, the Baltic Rim was largely terra incognita-but by the late Middle Ages, it was home to diverse small and large communities. But the Baltic Rim was not simply the place those people lived-it was also an imagined space through which they defined themselves and their identities. This book traces the transformation of the Baltic Rim in this period through a focus on the self-image of a number of communities: urban and regional, cultic, missionary, legal, and political. Contributors look at the ways these communities defined themselves in relationship to other groups, how they constructed their identities and customs, and what held them together or tore them apart.
THE BOOK IS OPEN ACCESS, AVAILABLE through JSTOR services.
This multidisciplinary volume draws together contributions from history, archaeology, and the his... more This multidisciplinary volume draws together contributions from history, archaeology, and the history of religion to offer an in-depth examination of political ritual and its performative and transformative potential across Continental Europe and Scandinavia. Covering the period between c. 650 and 1350, this work takes a theoretical, textual, and practical approach to the study of political ritual, and explores the connections between, and changing functions of, key rituals such as assemblies, feasts, and religious confrontations between pagans and Christians.
Taking as a central premise the fact that rituals were not only successful political instruments used to create and maintain order, but were also a hazardous game in which intended strategies could fail, the papers within this volume demonstrate that the outcomes of feasts or court meetings were often highly unpredictable, and a friendly atmosphere could quickly change into a violent clash. By emphasising the conflict-ridden and unpredictable nature of ritual acts, the articles add crucial insights into the meanings, (ab)uses, and interpretations of performances in the Middle Ages. In doing so, they demonstrate that rituals, far from being mere representations of power, also constituted an important mechanism through which the political and religious order could be challenged and transformed.
Acta Poloniae Historica 129, Special issue: Languages of Power and Elite Legitimisation in Poland and Norway, 1000–1300, 2024
In this introduction, we argue that the key to understanding the means and dynamics of political ... more In this introduction, we argue that the key to understanding the means and dynamics of political order in the peripheral polities during the era of Europeanization (1000–1300) lies in exploring the practices of (self-)legitimisation by the peripheral elites in Poland and Norway. The article proposes a novel agenda-setting theoretical and methodological framework for how medievalists can study elite legitimation and relations between core European and peripheral polities from a comparative perspective. This introduction launches this agenda in five steps. First, it outlines the key conceptual tools for studying the elites and the languages of power they used as means of symbolically legitimising themselves. Second, it re-assesses Robert J. Bartlett’s thesis of diffusive Europeanization to argue how a comparative focus on the peripheral elites and their languages of power can give a new perspective on this research topic. Third, it lays out the methodological tenets of an experimental comparative framework for elite legitimation on the peripheries. Fourth, it fleshes out these postulations in connection to our two contrasting cases and contexts, Polish and Norwegian. Finally, it presents the specific comparative case studies in this special issue.
Acta Poloniae Historica 129, Special issue: Languages of Power and Elite Legitimisation in Poland and Norway, 1000–1300, 2024
This article explores the ways in which the political legitimacy of the elites was produced and d... more This article explores the ways in which the political legitimacy of the elites was produced and demonstrated through feasting as it was practised in two peripheral high-medieval polities, Poland and Norway. By paying attention to the ways the political and moral economy of feasts and their use as a means of propaganda and political recognition were presented in contemporary sources, this article, through two case studies of peripheral languages of power and legitimisation, traces the similarities and differences in elite feasting in these disconnected contexts. Three aspects of political feasting are studied in comparison. First, the question of the supernatural charisma of rulers and ruling dynasties demonstrated through their-mythically and historically framed-ability to provide economic prosperity for their people and followers is examined. Second, we discuss how the rulers' social power, entitlement, and ability enabled them to extract material resources from the rest of the elites and their subjects, how resources were then redistributed and what symbolic capital these endowed upon the elites. The third section focuses on high-status feasts at which foreign elites from European centres were entertained to secure international recognition of the peripheral elites and gain institutional advantages such as coronations, archepiscopal titles, etc.
´This article explores the challenges and opportunities of writing and defending a compilation th... more ´This article explores the challenges and opportunities of writing and defending a compilation thesis (composed of several articles and an extensive introduction) in Sweden in the discipline of history, which traditionally leans towards monographs. The authors explore PhD education as an interstitial field, combining elements of education and research, that is governed by partially conflicting expectations about forms of academic publication and evaluation. The investigation encompasses challenges and opportunities faced by PhD students during their postgraduate education, self-reported, as perceived by senior scholars, and structural, embedded within PhD education.
Empirically this study builds on two types of data. First, it presents an extensive survey of the literature on the academic quality of compilation theses in several disciplines, with a special focus on history. Second, it builds on in-depth interviews with three former PhD students in history (from the 1990s to the 2020s) who are still active in the field, and their experiences of writing a compilation thesis and its impact on their subsequent careers. The issues they raised ranged from academic independence and control to the resistance they encountered in the discipline and how they dealt with it. The article makes a number of practical recommendations for how postgraduate education in history could address and alleviate some of the challenges of writing a compilation thesis.
This article explores the ways episcopal milieus on the northeastern peripheries of Europe create... more This article explores the ways episcopal milieus on the northeastern peripheries of Europe created and renewed their identities and symbols of episcopal authority by domesticating their immigrant saints during the high Middle Ages. By comparing the examples of holy bishops arriving to Poland and Sweden (St Adalbert, St Sigfrid, St Henry) it studies the episcopal mythopoesis, that is, creation of foundational myths and mythologies as well as their adaptation to specific local needs and changing historical circumstances. The article further probes to what extent these mythopoetic efforts were original or imitative in respect of the Western European episcopal centers and other peripheries. How similarly or differently did the bishops in the “old” and “young” Europe respond to the question: what beginnings do we need today? And what role did the appropriation, commodification, and domestication of holy bishops’ images and body parts play in providing answers to this vital question?
There was no holy king in Poland during the Middle Ages. Although
the Piast polity belonged to th... more There was no holy king in Poland during the Middle Ages. Although the Piast polity belonged to the North-eastern European periphery (East-Central Europe and Scandinavia), where essentially all post- 1000 CE polities boasted dynastic martyred holy rulers of native origin, the Piasts never elevated a member of their kin to such a position. The present article takes this puzzling exception as a point of departure to advance the argument that the episcopal holy patron of Poland of Bohemian origin – St Adalbert (c. 956– 997) – may in many regards be interpreted as a version of Marshall Sahlins’s stranger-king. By combining anthropological theory and comparative evidence, the article explores the locally produced hagiographical sources from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries in order to demonstrate how St Adalbert’s heroic status and retroactively invented ethnic and sacral otherness were exploited for the purposes of institutional and king-like legitimacy vis-à-vis the Polish people. In its conclusions the article argues that concepts and comparative methods from political anthropology can help us to reconsider the category of holy rulers and offer new ways of reading hagiographical sources as political treatises.
This article explores the ways episcopal milieus on the north-eastern peripheries of Europe creat... more This article explores the ways episcopal milieus on the north-eastern peripheries of Europe created and renewed their identities and symbols of episcopal authority by domesticating their immigrant saints during the high Middle Ages. By comparing the examples of holy bishops arriving to Poland and Sweden (St Adalbert, St Sigfrid, St Henry), it studies the episcopal mythopoesis, that is, the creation of foundational myths and mythologies as well as their adaptation to specifi c local needs and changing historical circumstances. The article further probes to what extent these mythopoetic efforts were original or imitative in comparison to the Western European episcopal centres and other peripheries. How similarly or differently did the bishops in the “old” and “young” Europe respond to the question: What beginnings do we need today? And what role did the appropriation, commodifi cation, and domestication of holy bishops’ images and body parts play in building the institutional identiti...
in: Sari Nauman, Wojtek Jezierski, Christina Reimann, Leif Runefelt (eds.), Baltic Hospitality from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century: Receiving Strangers in Northeastern Europe (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), pp. 1-29, 2022
The introductory chapter presents the thematic, geographical, and chronological scope of the volu... more The introductory chapter presents the thematic, geographical, and chronological scope of the volume and explicates its guiding questions and conceptual framework. Our focus is on the Baltic Sea region, considered as a multi-layered space of intercultural encounter and conflict and its specific legacy of hospitality. In terms of guiding concepts for the empirical chapters, this introduction combines issues of host–guest relations with the problems of securitization. It is our contention that hospitality in Baltic migration contexts, from the turn of the first millennium until the twentieth century and beyond, triggered security issues both on the part of arriving strangers and receiving host communities. Why and how were multifarious categories of guests and strangers—migrants, war refugees, prisoners of war, merchants, missionaries, vagrants, vagabonds, etc.—portrayed as threats to local populations or as objects of their charity? Under what circumstances did hospitality turn into hostility? How was hospitality practiced and contained spatially? By focusing predominantly on coastal contexts as spaces for meetings and confrontations, we decouple the study of hospitality and migration from state-centered methodology. Instead, we offer a close-up view on hospitality dilemmas and practices of dealing with arriving guests and strangers, which we consider in transhistorical perspective. These conceptual themes and problems are fleshed out in the presentation of the individual chapters.
What anxieties did medieval missionaries and crusaders face and what role did the sense of risk ... more What anxieties did medieval missionaries and crusaders face and what role did the sense of risk play in their community-building? To what extent did crusaders and Christian colonists empathize with the local populations they set out to conquer? Who were the hosts and who were the guests during the confrontations with the pagan societies on the Baltic Rim? And how were the uncertainties of the conversion process addressed in concrete encounters and in the accounts of Christian authors?
This book explores emotional bonding as well as practices and discourses of hospitality as uncertain means of evangelization, interaction, and socialization across cultural divides on the Baltic Rim, c. 1000–1300. It focuses on interactions between local populations and missionary communities, as well as crusader frontier societies. By applying tools of historical anthropology to the study of host-guest relations, spaces of hospitality, emotional communities, and empathy on the fronts of Christianization, this book offers fresh insights and approaches to the manner in which missionaries and crusaders reflexively engaged with the groups targeted by Christianization in terms of practice, ethics, and identity.
Can we think of a Benedictine cloister around the year 1000 as reminiscent of a modern prison or ... more Can we think of a Benedictine cloister around the year 1000 as reminiscent of a modern prison or a mental asylum? Was the monastery a medieval type of Erving Goffman's 'total institution' or Benthanian panopticon thoroughly structuring the thoughts and practices of its inmates? What did the power relations between the groups of monks in medieval St Gall look like? Wojtek Jezierski's thesis explores and expands the connection between the medieval forms of monastic life and modern social theories. It investigates the patterns of persecution and exclusion, the exercise of power and surveillance, as well as violent conflicts between the conventuals and their abbots. It analyzes also the social components of monastic habitus and subjectivity in the monasteries of St Gall, Fulda, Bury St Edmunds and others. Finally, the study examines the strategies monks used to cope with the demands made on them by the external lay world, i.e. the political, social, and cultural liaisons between claustrum and saeculum. Wojtek Jezierski (b. 1979) studied history and social anthropology the University of Warsaw. He conducts research at the Department of History and the centre for Medieval Studies, Stockholm University. This book is his PhD thesis.
Acta Poloniae Historica 129 (ISSN 2450-8462), 2024
This special issue investigates symbolic languages employed by religious and political elites in ... more This special issue investigates symbolic languages employed by religious and political elites in two peripheral polities, Poland and Norway, 1000-1300, with a particular focus on the politically legitimizing role and competitive use of such means. Scholarship on medieval peripheral elites, such as these from Scandinavia or East-Central Europe, has traditionally been investigated through the diffusionist paradigm of Europeanization (R. Bartlett), which focused on their relationship with the political and cultural centers (Western Europe, papacy, Byzantium etc.), passive adaptation to political culture, patterns of acculturation and integration, etc. Within their respective, nationally framed historiographies, the two polities during this period have been traditionally considered from the teleological perspective of centralistic and hierarchy-inducing state-building processes. In this issue, however, we turn the focus to the competitive symbolic languages of (self-)legitimization employed by these peripheral elites in the context of two polities, whose elements of order remained in flux or could be ranked in different, often shifting, and sometimes conflicting ways. By considering this problem through a comparative Norwegian and Polish case-studies this special issue studies the conditions and practical means of formation of elites and competition within them in two distinct polities facing similar challenges.
Reflecting debate around hospitality and the Baltic Sea region, this open access book taps into w... more Reflecting debate around hospitality and the Baltic Sea region, this open access book taps into wider discussions about reception, securitization and xenophobic attitudes towards migrants and strangers. Focusing on coastal and urban areas, the collection presents an overview of the responses of host communities to guests and strangers in the countries surrounding the Baltic Sea, from the early eleventh century to the twentieth. The chapters investigate why and how diverse categories of strangers including migrants, war refugees, prisoners of war, merchants, missionaries and vagrants, were portrayed as threats to local populations or as objects of their charity, shedding light on the current predicament facing many European countries. Emphasizing the Baltic Sea region as a uniquely multi-layered space of intercultural encounter and conflict, this book demonstrates the significance of Northeastern Europe to migration history.
This book explores the practical and symbolic resources of legitimacy which the elites of medieva... more This book explores the practical and symbolic resources of legitimacy which the elites of medieval Scandinavia employed to establish, justify, and reproduce their social and political standing between the end of the Viking Age and the rise of kingdoms in the thirteenth century. Geographically the chapters cover the Scandinavian realms and Free State Iceland. Thematically the authors cover a wide palette of cultural practices and historical sources: hagiography, historiography, spaces and palaces, literature, and international connections, which rulers, magnates, or ecclesiastics used to compete for status and to reserve haloing glory for themselves. The volume is divided in three sections. The first looks at the sacral, legal, and acclamatory means through which privilege was conferred onto kings and ruling families. Section II explores the spaces such as aristocratic halls, palaces, churches in which the social elevation of elites took place. Section III explores the traditional and novel means of domestic distinction and international cultural capital which different orders of elites-knights, powerful clerics, ruling families, etc.-wrought to assure their dominance and set themselves apart vis-à-vis their peers and subjects. A concluding chapter discusses how the use of symbolic capital in the North compared to wider European contexts.
Prior to the high Middle Ages, the Baltic Rim was largely terra incognita-but by the late Middle ... more Prior to the high Middle Ages, the Baltic Rim was largely terra incognita-but by the late Middle Ages, it was home to diverse small and large communities. But the Baltic Rim was not simply the place those people lived-it was also an imagined space through which they defined themselves and their identities. This book traces the transformation of the Baltic Rim in this period through a focus on the self-image of a number of communities: urban and regional, cultic, missionary, legal, and political. Contributors look at the ways these communities defined themselves in relationship to other groups, how they constructed their identities and customs, and what held them together or tore them apart.
THE BOOK IS OPEN ACCESS, AVAILABLE through JSTOR services.
This multidisciplinary volume draws together contributions from history, archaeology, and the his... more This multidisciplinary volume draws together contributions from history, archaeology, and the history of religion to offer an in-depth examination of political ritual and its performative and transformative potential across Continental Europe and Scandinavia. Covering the period between c. 650 and 1350, this work takes a theoretical, textual, and practical approach to the study of political ritual, and explores the connections between, and changing functions of, key rituals such as assemblies, feasts, and religious confrontations between pagans and Christians.
Taking as a central premise the fact that rituals were not only successful political instruments used to create and maintain order, but were also a hazardous game in which intended strategies could fail, the papers within this volume demonstrate that the outcomes of feasts or court meetings were often highly unpredictable, and a friendly atmosphere could quickly change into a violent clash. By emphasising the conflict-ridden and unpredictable nature of ritual acts, the articles add crucial insights into the meanings, (ab)uses, and interpretations of performances in the Middle Ages. In doing so, they demonstrate that rituals, far from being mere representations of power, also constituted an important mechanism through which the political and religious order could be challenged and transformed.
Acta Poloniae Historica 129, Special issue: Languages of Power and Elite Legitimisation in Poland and Norway, 1000–1300, 2024
In this introduction, we argue that the key to understanding the means and dynamics of political ... more In this introduction, we argue that the key to understanding the means and dynamics of political order in the peripheral polities during the era of Europeanization (1000–1300) lies in exploring the practices of (self-)legitimisation by the peripheral elites in Poland and Norway. The article proposes a novel agenda-setting theoretical and methodological framework for how medievalists can study elite legitimation and relations between core European and peripheral polities from a comparative perspective. This introduction launches this agenda in five steps. First, it outlines the key conceptual tools for studying the elites and the languages of power they used as means of symbolically legitimising themselves. Second, it re-assesses Robert J. Bartlett’s thesis of diffusive Europeanization to argue how a comparative focus on the peripheral elites and their languages of power can give a new perspective on this research topic. Third, it lays out the methodological tenets of an experimental comparative framework for elite legitimation on the peripheries. Fourth, it fleshes out these postulations in connection to our two contrasting cases and contexts, Polish and Norwegian. Finally, it presents the specific comparative case studies in this special issue.
Acta Poloniae Historica 129, Special issue: Languages of Power and Elite Legitimisation in Poland and Norway, 1000–1300, 2024
This article explores the ways in which the political legitimacy of the elites was produced and d... more This article explores the ways in which the political legitimacy of the elites was produced and demonstrated through feasting as it was practised in two peripheral high-medieval polities, Poland and Norway. By paying attention to the ways the political and moral economy of feasts and their use as a means of propaganda and political recognition were presented in contemporary sources, this article, through two case studies of peripheral languages of power and legitimisation, traces the similarities and differences in elite feasting in these disconnected contexts. Three aspects of political feasting are studied in comparison. First, the question of the supernatural charisma of rulers and ruling dynasties demonstrated through their-mythically and historically framed-ability to provide economic prosperity for their people and followers is examined. Second, we discuss how the rulers' social power, entitlement, and ability enabled them to extract material resources from the rest of the elites and their subjects, how resources were then redistributed and what symbolic capital these endowed upon the elites. The third section focuses on high-status feasts at which foreign elites from European centres were entertained to secure international recognition of the peripheral elites and gain institutional advantages such as coronations, archepiscopal titles, etc.
´This article explores the challenges and opportunities of writing and defending a compilation th... more ´This article explores the challenges and opportunities of writing and defending a compilation thesis (composed of several articles and an extensive introduction) in Sweden in the discipline of history, which traditionally leans towards monographs. The authors explore PhD education as an interstitial field, combining elements of education and research, that is governed by partially conflicting expectations about forms of academic publication and evaluation. The investigation encompasses challenges and opportunities faced by PhD students during their postgraduate education, self-reported, as perceived by senior scholars, and structural, embedded within PhD education.
Empirically this study builds on two types of data. First, it presents an extensive survey of the literature on the academic quality of compilation theses in several disciplines, with a special focus on history. Second, it builds on in-depth interviews with three former PhD students in history (from the 1990s to the 2020s) who are still active in the field, and their experiences of writing a compilation thesis and its impact on their subsequent careers. The issues they raised ranged from academic independence and control to the resistance they encountered in the discipline and how they dealt with it. The article makes a number of practical recommendations for how postgraduate education in history could address and alleviate some of the challenges of writing a compilation thesis.
This article explores the ways episcopal milieus on the northeastern peripheries of Europe create... more This article explores the ways episcopal milieus on the northeastern peripheries of Europe created and renewed their identities and symbols of episcopal authority by domesticating their immigrant saints during the high Middle Ages. By comparing the examples of holy bishops arriving to Poland and Sweden (St Adalbert, St Sigfrid, St Henry) it studies the episcopal mythopoesis, that is, creation of foundational myths and mythologies as well as their adaptation to specific local needs and changing historical circumstances. The article further probes to what extent these mythopoetic efforts were original or imitative in respect of the Western European episcopal centers and other peripheries. How similarly or differently did the bishops in the “old” and “young” Europe respond to the question: what beginnings do we need today? And what role did the appropriation, commodification, and domestication of holy bishops’ images and body parts play in providing answers to this vital question?
There was no holy king in Poland during the Middle Ages. Although
the Piast polity belonged to th... more There was no holy king in Poland during the Middle Ages. Although the Piast polity belonged to the North-eastern European periphery (East-Central Europe and Scandinavia), where essentially all post- 1000 CE polities boasted dynastic martyred holy rulers of native origin, the Piasts never elevated a member of their kin to such a position. The present article takes this puzzling exception as a point of departure to advance the argument that the episcopal holy patron of Poland of Bohemian origin – St Adalbert (c. 956– 997) – may in many regards be interpreted as a version of Marshall Sahlins’s stranger-king. By combining anthropological theory and comparative evidence, the article explores the locally produced hagiographical sources from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries in order to demonstrate how St Adalbert’s heroic status and retroactively invented ethnic and sacral otherness were exploited for the purposes of institutional and king-like legitimacy vis-à-vis the Polish people. In its conclusions the article argues that concepts and comparative methods from political anthropology can help us to reconsider the category of holy rulers and offer new ways of reading hagiographical sources as political treatises.
This article explores the ways episcopal milieus on the north-eastern peripheries of Europe creat... more This article explores the ways episcopal milieus on the north-eastern peripheries of Europe created and renewed their identities and symbols of episcopal authority by domesticating their immigrant saints during the high Middle Ages. By comparing the examples of holy bishops arriving to Poland and Sweden (St Adalbert, St Sigfrid, St Henry), it studies the episcopal mythopoesis, that is, the creation of foundational myths and mythologies as well as their adaptation to specifi c local needs and changing historical circumstances. The article further probes to what extent these mythopoetic efforts were original or imitative in comparison to the Western European episcopal centres and other peripheries. How similarly or differently did the bishops in the “old” and “young” Europe respond to the question: What beginnings do we need today? And what role did the appropriation, commodifi cation, and domestication of holy bishops’ images and body parts play in building the institutional identiti...
in: Sari Nauman, Wojtek Jezierski, Christina Reimann, Leif Runefelt (eds.), Baltic Hospitality from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century: Receiving Strangers in Northeastern Europe (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), pp. 1-29, 2022
The introductory chapter presents the thematic, geographical, and chronological scope of the volu... more The introductory chapter presents the thematic, geographical, and chronological scope of the volume and explicates its guiding questions and conceptual framework. Our focus is on the Baltic Sea region, considered as a multi-layered space of intercultural encounter and conflict and its specific legacy of hospitality. In terms of guiding concepts for the empirical chapters, this introduction combines issues of host–guest relations with the problems of securitization. It is our contention that hospitality in Baltic migration contexts, from the turn of the first millennium until the twentieth century and beyond, triggered security issues both on the part of arriving strangers and receiving host communities. Why and how were multifarious categories of guests and strangers—migrants, war refugees, prisoners of war, merchants, missionaries, vagrants, vagabonds, etc.—portrayed as threats to local populations or as objects of their charity? Under what circumstances did hospitality turn into hostility? How was hospitality practiced and contained spatially? By focusing predominantly on coastal contexts as spaces for meetings and confrontations, we decouple the study of hospitality and migration from state-centered methodology. Instead, we offer a close-up view on hospitality dilemmas and practices of dealing with arriving guests and strangers, which we consider in transhistorical perspective. These conceptual themes and problems are fleshed out in the presentation of the individual chapters.
in: Sari Nauman, Wojtek Jezierski, Christina Reimann, Leif Runefelt (eds.), Baltic Hospitality from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century: Receiving Strangers in Northeastern Europe (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), pp. 33-62, 2022
This chapter studies examples of confrontations between missionary guests and pagan host communit... more This chapter studies examples of confrontations between missionary guests and pagan host communities on the Baltic Rim from the late tenth to mid-twelfth centuries to uncover the spatial dynamics and intercultural articulations of hospitality in Christianization contexts. In terms of method, the chapter focuses on the functional, political, and symbolic mechanisms structuring collective production spaces of hospitality during such encounters. The addressed problems consider how spaces of hospitality were practically and discursively produced and negotiated through such meetings. It delves also into the ways arrival of this special type of Christian strangers and guests was contained in terms of power relations and security measures. And, finally, how these interactions involved and oscillated between hospitable and hostile attitudes. The results point out the deeply ambiguous, volatile, and heavily contested nature of spaces of hospitality in the Christianization of the Baltic Rim, both for missionary agents and for the host communities receiving/rejecting them.
The notion of sovereignty remains one of the most scholarly and
historically contested concepts. ... more The notion of sovereignty remains one of the most scholarly and historically contested concepts. In this article we argue that historians’ absorption of sovereignty’s spatiality needs to be complemented by an investigation of its temporality. By tracing the late medieval and early modern connections between political theology and economic teleology—between the permanence of political incorporation and perpetuation of the administrative apparatus —this article outlines a new research agenda and a novel vantage point for investigating state formation in Sweden. The article scrutinizes the following four areas: (1) The ideas of incorporation and representation of the realm and the Swedish people in late medieval historiography; (2) the transformation of political loyalty from personal oaths of and to the monarchs to popular, national loyalty; (3) the transformation of tax-collection from occasional to perpetual; and (4) the transition from personal debts of monarchs to state debt.
The conquest and colonisation of the northeastern Baltic Rim in the 13th century durably shaped r... more The conquest and colonisation of the northeastern Baltic Rim in the 13th century durably shaped religious and ethnic identities of and relations between the native population and the arriving crusaders. This article explores the codes and displays of hospitality in the anonymous ‘Livonian Rhymed Chronicle’, which are seen here as ways of conceptualising the relationship and conflicts between the Teutonic Knights and the pagan or apostate people in Livonia. It asks which consequences the framing of the host-guest relations might have had for the self-comprehension of the chronicle’s author and his audience. The analysis of the chronicle is pursued along three lines: the first focuses on the questions of chivalry, courtesy, and conversion; the second explores different renditions of a miracle story of inhospitality from the 1220s; the third focuses on the conceptual metaphors of hospitality as a way in which the Teutonic Knights accommodated their adversaries’ viewpoints. In its conclusions, the article argues how a broad focus on the institutions, concepts, and discourses of hospitality can help account for both confrontational and amicable attitudes between the colonisers and the colonised both on the Baltic frontier and among other European frontier societies.
in: Nordic Elites in Transformation, c. 1050–1250, vol. III Legitimacy and Glory, ed. W. Jezierski, K. Esmark, H.J. Orning, J.V. Sigurdsson (Routledge: New York), pp. 1-35, 2021
This introductory chapter presents the geographical, chronological, and thematic scope of the vol... more This introductory chapter presents the geographical, chronological, and thematic scope of the volume and expounds its guiding questions and conceptual framework. By combining Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of symbolic capital and doxa, Giorgio Agamben’s examination of medieval economy of gloria, and Max Weber’s threefold model of legitimation of leadership, the chapter discusses how medieval Scandinavian elites fused sacral and practical resources to elevate themselves and convince others of their social and political legitimacy, that is, their deservedness to rule. What is proposed is a dynamic, heterarchic, and practice-oriented model of studying how sociopolitical status and haloing glory were competed for, justified, and reproduced over time. These conceptual themes and problems are fleshed out in the presentation of the individual chapters and the three sections into which the entire volume is divided: Glorifying Kings, Spaces of Elevation, and Elevating Social Orders. In its last section the chapter discusses how the sudden boom in literary production and composition of historical sources on the verge of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries both reflected and was the vehicle of elite competition in Scandinavia.
We warmly invite proposals for papers for the conference Ambiguities of Hospitality in the Middle... more We warmly invite proposals for papers for the conference Ambiguities of Hospitality in the Middle Ages, 1000-1350 to be held at Stockholm University on the 8-9 th September 2022. The conference is open to established and early career researchers as well as graduate students, and to scholars of the Middle Ages of all disciplinary backgrounds, including but not limited to historians, archaeologists as well as scholars of literature and art.
For the past millennium the Baltic coastal regions, urban and proto-urban areas, and harbours hav... more For the past millennium the Baltic coastal regions, urban and proto-urban areas, and harbours have functioned as spaces of connectivity and intercultural encounters. This conference and the prospective volume address the tension between hospitality and hostility towards many various guests arriving to those regions from the "discovery" of the Baltic around 1000 until the end of the nineteenth century when modern conventions regulating immigration and rights to asylum began to emerge. The ambition of this conference is to determine how this tension was practically resolved by reception or rejection of strangers and provision of security for the host community. Missionaries, crusaders, merchants, sailors, pirates, stranded or commandeered seamen, groups of people displaced in the wake of war, pestilence, or famine, refugees, soldiers, deserters, vagrants, wayward troops or religious communities, travelling priests and artists, émigrés etc. can all be considered as guests or strangers arriving to different host communities scattered all over the Baltic Sea. By focusing on the social orders established at the land/sea intersection, which were susceptible for disruption by the arrival of others, the goal of this conference is to explore the contingencies of hospitality on the Baltic Rim from the Middle Ages until the twentieth century.
For the past millennium the Baltic coastal regions, urban and proto-urban areas, and harbours hav... more For the past millennium the Baltic coastal regions, urban and proto-urban areas, and harbours have functioned as spaces of connectivity and intercultural encounters. This conference and the prospective volume address the tension between hospitality and hostility towards many various guests arriving to those regions from the “discovery” of the Baltic around 1000 until the end of the nineteenth century when modern conventions regulating immigration and rights to asylum began to emerge. The ambition of this conference is to determine how this tension was practically resolved by reception or rejection of strangers and provision of security for the host community.
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This book explores emotional bonding as well as practices and discourses of hospitality as uncertain means of evangelization, interaction, and socialization across cultural divides on the Baltic Rim, c. 1000–1300. It focuses on interactions between local populations and missionary communities, as well as crusader frontier societies. By applying tools of historical anthropology to the study of host-guest relations, spaces of hospitality, emotional communities, and empathy on the fronts of Christianization, this book offers fresh insights and approaches to the manner in which missionaries and crusaders reflexively engaged with the groups targeted by Christianization in terms of practice, ethics, and identity.
THE BOOK IS OPEN ACCESS, AVAILABLE through JSTOR services.
Taking as a central premise the fact that rituals were not only successful political instruments used to create and maintain order, but were also a hazardous game in which intended strategies could fail, the papers within this volume demonstrate that the outcomes of feasts or court meetings were often highly unpredictable, and a friendly atmosphere could quickly change into a violent clash. By emphasising the conflict-ridden and unpredictable nature of ritual acts, the articles add crucial insights into the meanings, (ab)uses, and interpretations of performances in the Middle Ages. In doing so, they demonstrate that rituals, far from being mere representations of power, also constituted an important mechanism through which the political and religious order could be challenged and transformed.
Empirically this study builds on two types of data. First, it presents an extensive survey of the literature on the academic quality of compilation theses in several disciplines, with a special focus on history. Second, it builds on in-depth interviews with three former PhD students in history (from the 1990s to the 2020s) who are still active in the field, and their experiences of writing a compilation thesis and its impact on their subsequent careers. The issues they raised ranged from academic independence and control to the resistance they encountered in the discipline and how they dealt with it. The article makes a number of practical recommendations for how postgraduate education in history could address and alleviate some of the challenges of writing a compilation thesis.
the Piast polity belonged to the North-eastern European periphery
(East-Central Europe and Scandinavia), where essentially all post-
1000 CE polities boasted dynastic martyred holy rulers of native
origin, the Piasts never elevated a member of their kin to such a
position. The present article takes this puzzling exception as a
point of departure to advance the argument that the episcopal
holy patron of Poland of Bohemian origin – St Adalbert (c. 956–
997) – may in many regards be interpreted as a version of
Marshall Sahlins’s stranger-king. By combining anthropological
theory and comparative evidence, the article explores the locally
produced hagiographical sources from the twelfth to the
fifteenth centuries in order to demonstrate how St Adalbert’s
heroic status and retroactively invented ethnic and sacral
otherness were exploited for the purposes of institutional and
king-like legitimacy vis-à-vis the Polish people. In its conclusions
the article argues that concepts and comparative methods from
political anthropology can help us to reconsider the category of
holy rulers and offer new ways of reading hagiographical sources
as political treatises.
This book explores emotional bonding as well as practices and discourses of hospitality as uncertain means of evangelization, interaction, and socialization across cultural divides on the Baltic Rim, c. 1000–1300. It focuses on interactions between local populations and missionary communities, as well as crusader frontier societies. By applying tools of historical anthropology to the study of host-guest relations, spaces of hospitality, emotional communities, and empathy on the fronts of Christianization, this book offers fresh insights and approaches to the manner in which missionaries and crusaders reflexively engaged with the groups targeted by Christianization in terms of practice, ethics, and identity.
THE BOOK IS OPEN ACCESS, AVAILABLE through JSTOR services.
Taking as a central premise the fact that rituals were not only successful political instruments used to create and maintain order, but were also a hazardous game in which intended strategies could fail, the papers within this volume demonstrate that the outcomes of feasts or court meetings were often highly unpredictable, and a friendly atmosphere could quickly change into a violent clash. By emphasising the conflict-ridden and unpredictable nature of ritual acts, the articles add crucial insights into the meanings, (ab)uses, and interpretations of performances in the Middle Ages. In doing so, they demonstrate that rituals, far from being mere representations of power, also constituted an important mechanism through which the political and religious order could be challenged and transformed.
Empirically this study builds on two types of data. First, it presents an extensive survey of the literature on the academic quality of compilation theses in several disciplines, with a special focus on history. Second, it builds on in-depth interviews with three former PhD students in history (from the 1990s to the 2020s) who are still active in the field, and their experiences of writing a compilation thesis and its impact on their subsequent careers. The issues they raised ranged from academic independence and control to the resistance they encountered in the discipline and how they dealt with it. The article makes a number of practical recommendations for how postgraduate education in history could address and alleviate some of the challenges of writing a compilation thesis.
the Piast polity belonged to the North-eastern European periphery
(East-Central Europe and Scandinavia), where essentially all post-
1000 CE polities boasted dynastic martyred holy rulers of native
origin, the Piasts never elevated a member of their kin to such a
position. The present article takes this puzzling exception as a
point of departure to advance the argument that the episcopal
holy patron of Poland of Bohemian origin – St Adalbert (c. 956–
997) – may in many regards be interpreted as a version of
Marshall Sahlins’s stranger-king. By combining anthropological
theory and comparative evidence, the article explores the locally
produced hagiographical sources from the twelfth to the
fifteenth centuries in order to demonstrate how St Adalbert’s
heroic status and retroactively invented ethnic and sacral
otherness were exploited for the purposes of institutional and
king-like legitimacy vis-à-vis the Polish people. In its conclusions
the article argues that concepts and comparative methods from
political anthropology can help us to reconsider the category of
holy rulers and offer new ways of reading hagiographical sources
as political treatises.
historically contested concepts. In this article we argue that historians’ absorption of sovereignty’s spatiality needs to be complemented by an investigation of its temporality. By tracing the late medieval and early modern connections between political theology and economic teleology—between the permanence of political incorporation and perpetuation of the administrative apparatus —this article outlines a new research agenda and a novel vantage point for investigating state formation in Sweden. The article scrutinizes the following four areas: (1) The ideas of incorporation and representation of the realm and the Swedish people in late medieval historiography; (2) the transformation of political loyalty from personal oaths of and to the monarchs to popular, national loyalty; (3) the transformation of tax-collection from occasional to perpetual; and (4) the transition from personal debts of monarchs to state debt.