This volume looks at the South German merchant community during Antwerp's Golden Age by examining German involvement in the social life of the city as well as by tracing merchants' commercial activities. The first section of the book considers the institutions of trade and the role Germans played in their development and how Germans interacted with other foreign merchant communities. The second section takes a wider view by tracing the commercial networks that South German merchants operated in and by quantifying South German participation in Antwerp's foreign trade.

Nils Blomkvist discusses how the Baltic Rim was initially Europeanized between 1075 and 1225 AD. He compares the indigenous civilisations to the prevailing western European one. After the expansive Viking period, European penetration became a process of discovery.
The importance of the Catholic Reform movement and its unintentional ties to the formation of an endurable commodity market are outlined. Clashes and compromises are investigated in case studies of the Kalmarsund region, Gotland and the Daugava valley. Dissimilar cases of state formation are compared: those of Sweden and...

This nine-essay volume provides the first full-length, detailed exploration of the kingdom of Scotland during the reign of Alexander II (1214-49), and the most extensive analysis of this key state-builder and his policies.

The book uses sagas and legal texts to re-examine the relations between mediaeval Icelanders and the Norwegian kings. It demonstrates that the Icelanders - partly subjects of the king, and partly beyond his power - were ready to negotiate with him for their own benefit, and presents a methodological re-evaluation of authorial attributions of the sagas and their use as historical sources. Key to the book is a revisionary analysis of two laws made between the Icelanders and the kings of Norway: a law probably issued by King Olafr inn helgi of Norway (1015-1028), and the purported submission...

The eleven wide-ranging essays in this volume covering the medieval and early modern periods explore how coercive power was established within, over, and by the cities of the Low Countries. They suggest a distinctive path of political development.

This work examines Edinburgh's contribution to the outbreak of the British civil wars and its importance in the establishment of the revolutionary Covenanting regime. Early modern urban culture, multiple monarchy and post-Reformation religious radicalism are key themes of the book.

Kingship and State Formation in Sweden covers, for the first time in English, a key period in the consolidation of the Swedish state. The book begins with an overview of Sweden prior to the twelfth century and a reign-by-reign history of the period 1130-1290. Thereafter issues related to kingship and state formation are treated thematically, with sections on royal administration and taxation, legal and military institutions, relations between king and Church, the development of Christian kingship ideology and expansion into Finland. Extensive appendices are included on the genealogy...

This ground-breaking study of the role of crusading in late-medieval and early modern Denmark argues that crusading had a tremendous impact on political and religious life in Scandinavia all through the Middle Ages, which continued long after the Reformation ostensibly should have put an end to its viability within Protestant Denmark.

The focus of this book is on the cult of St Magnus, Earl of Orkney, who was killed in 1116/1117 in an inter-dynastic dispute. More specifically, it looks at the emergence of the Magnus' cult in the twelfth century and the hagiographical corpus that was composed in his honour by Icelandic and English men of letters. These aspects of the Orcadian cult are not, however, examined in isolation but are rather placed within broader Scandinavian and European contexts. Moreover, they provide points of departure for the examination of important topics relating to religious life and literature in early...

This study bridges economic and social history, and forces a reassessment of four early modern historiographies: Dutch, French, Jewish, and Atlantic. The trade along the North Sea and Atlantic coasts of Europe has been given relatively little attention in comparison with trans-oceanic and Baltic commerce. Wine and brandy were among the key commodities shipped from south-western to northern Europe, so new evidence on the alcohol trade enables us to properly recognize the impact of this sector on the economies of France, the Dutch Republic, and the Atlantic world. Transnational in scope, this...