Our historical understanding of the Reformation in northern Europe has tended to privilege the idea of disruption and innovation over continuity yet even the most powerful reformation movements drew on and exchanged ideas with earlier cultural and religious practices. This volume attempts to right the balance, bringing together a roster of experts to trace the continuities between the medieval and early modern period in the Nordic realm, while enabling us to see the Reformation and its changes in a new light.
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A late medieval Icelandic romance about the maiden-king of France, the Nitioa saga was well received in its day and grew in popularity throughout post-Reformation Iceland. It has not, however, received the comprehensive scholarly analysis it deserves, or that other Icelandic sagas have received. Sheryl McDonald Werronen corrects that here, offering a detailed study of the saga and its presentation of women and the Icelandic worldview, including questions of identity, gender, female solidarity, and the romance genre itself.

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...

Our corporeality and immersion in the material world make us inherently spatial beings, and the fact that we all share everyday experiences in the global physical environment means that community is also spatial by nature. This book explores the relationship between the seventeenth-century townspeople of Turku, Sweden, and their urban surroundings. Riitta Laitinen offers a novel account of civil and social order in this early modern town, highlighting the central importance of materiality and spatiality and breaking down the dichotomy of public versus private life that has dominated...

The way that we have perceived, described, and understood sexual desire has changed dramatically over time and across cultures. This collection brings together a group of leading scholars from a variety of disciplines to explore the history of sexual desires and the transformation of sexual ideas, attitudes, and practices in premodern Europe. Among topics considered are the visibility of sexual offenses and the construction of passions; the geographical range extends to Great Britain, with extended attention also to France and Germany. The result is a groundbreaking volume that adds...

This book offers a new way of looking at Saint Thomas Aquinas-not as a living man, but as a posthumous source of relics.

The essays take on aspects of eighteenth-century texts such as plot, genre, character, perspective, temporality, and more, coming at them from both a narratological and a historical perspective.

Contacts and Networks in the Baltic Sea Region. Austmarr as a Northern mare nostrum, ca. 500-1500 CE.