Die Vorstellung vom Norden und der Eurozentrismus. Eine Auswertung der patristischen und mittelalterlichen Literatur (review)

This book offers a contribution to the current re-evaluation of the European self-perception by analyzing the representation of the northern regions of Europe from the biblical ages to the thirteenth century. The author focuses on the progressive integration of those regions into what Europe and Christianity were considered to be. He explores the ambivalence of this process, in which the North was either idealized or viewed as a threat to civilization, stating repeatedly that the construction of such representations held a reciprocal relationship with the rise of Eurocentrism.

It would hardly be possible to give an abstract of the three chapters in which the author offers an in-depth and innovative study of the images developed during Biblical and Greco-Roman Antiquity, the Patristic period, and the Middle Ages. The author succeeds in establishing significant distinctions such as the East-West axis that structures the oikoumene symmetrically in the Bible and, sticking to a significantly different agenda, in the works of ancient pagan authors. As a matter of fact, the Patristic period may be held responsible for the fusion of biblical images and the ethno-geographic knowledge of classical Antiquity as well as for the creation of a Christian schema of the World (through the acrostic of Adam's name in Greek being a sign of the Christian oikoumene; the Cross being a structuring element of the imago mundi; or Europeans being descendants of Japhet according to the reformulations of the table of peoples in Genesis). Hence the political geography of Antiquity seems to fade away, leaving space for a theology of geography in which the New Alliance is extended to all the people of the oikoumene in connection with the typology of Jesus Christ as the new Adam—two ideas that were at the basis of missionary activity. After the disaster of Adrianopolis (378), this conception faced the crude facts of the barbarian invasions (mostly those of the Goths and the Huns), which appeared to many as the concretization of the prophetic threat of plagues coming from the North. As for the Middle Ages, one can eventually identify, as the author does, a progressive integration of those regions into a Christian Europe that was growing northwards and hence restoring the lost unity of the pars Europae of the Japhetites. The construction of the argument, though persuasive and harmonious at once, may partly be based on premises that would call for a more profound evaluation. It seems doubtful, for instance, whether the acrostic of Adam really played such an important role in the Middle Ages. Certain general presumptions on the Christocentric symbolism of the mappae mundi, in which the "T" separates three parts (rather than continents) of the oikoumene as a Cross, are yet to be proven. It may be noted that the association of the sons of Noah with each of these parts is a relatively late phenomenon, which, being datable to a period that does not seem to begin earlier than the seventh century, can hardly have served as a foundation for the Patristic image of the World. Moreover, the exact relation of such historical aspects with the genealogy of Eurocentrism—an element that is explicitly mentioned by the author as an essential part of his thesis—is not sufficiently in evidence.

Nevertheless, such fragilities should in no way hide away the essential qualities of the work. Within the actual historiographical context, this study is markedly distinct from so many others, which merely paraphrase documents to misuse them in the context of impertinent theoretical constructions. The author has treated an enormous quantity of information (the...