Historical and Intellectual Culture in the Long Twelfth Century: The Scandinavian Connection ed. by Mia Münster-Swendsen, Thomas K. Heebøll-Holm, and Sigbjørn Olsen Sønnesyn (review)

This miscellany is the eminent product of a transdisciplinary research project conceived by the medieval Latin philologist and Saxo Grammaticus authority Karsten Friis-Jensen (†2012). In 2010, fifteen distinguished international scholars were invited to reflect on various aspects concerning early Danish historiography within its European context, and a series of conferences were organized at the Universities of Oxford and Leeds, where the contributors presented and discussed the results of their investigations. Regrettably, Friis-Jensen never saw the completion of his ambitious undertaking, as he passed away prematurely in 2012, when the project and the preparation of the volume were resumed by medieval historians Mia Münster-Swendsen, Thomas K. Heebøll-Holm, and Sigbjørn Olsen Sønnesyn. As anticipated in the introduction, which remains unsigned but is presumably co-authored by the editors, the collected essays illuminate the flourishing of the social and intellectual elites of twelfth-century Denmark by outlining their political and ecclesiastical connections to England, Germany, and France and, by a closer inspection, their appropriation and accommodation of coeval European intellectual traditions.

The first section, entitled "The Writing of History: European Context and Points of Comparison," reviews eminent examples of twelfth-century English, Hungarian, and German historiography and provides a background for the subsequent discussion of contemporary Scandinavian and, to a greater extent, Danish analogues. The book and the section open with an essay by Elisabeth van Houts, who evaluates the importance of the role played by marriage and married women in the commission and production of historical literature during Anglo-Norman England. Since numerous English and Norman families boasted ultimate Scandinavian ancestry, their dynastic and genealogical literature served, at least to some degree, as fertile soil for early Danish historiography. Nora Berend follows with an essay that reviews the treatment of the Christianization process of medieval Hungary in subsequent historiographical sources. It appears that in several instances events were either manipulated or invented ex novo by Hungarian historians, who were writing at the behest of their patrons. In the following essay, Alheydis Plassmann elaborates on Adam of Bremen's much-debated third book of Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, which is dedicated to Archbishop Adalbert of Hamburg-Bremen (†1072). In reasoning with late-eleventh-century gestae and vitae episcoporum produced in Eichstätt, Cambrai, Hildesheim, Worms, and Osnabrück, Plassmann reaches the conclusion that, from the perspective of his contemporaries, Adalbert should have limited his royal service and instead concentrated on the spiritual and worldly demands of his flock and diocese. In the final essay of the section, building on Jan Assmann's theory of cultural memory, Lasse C. A. Sonne notices a new favorable perception of the distant "pagan" past among medieval Norse authors during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries and doubts the existence of ancient Scandinavian narratives portraying pre-Christian antiquities, with the exception of skaldic poetry. Instead, he regards the Norse sagas as later creations and as literary manifestations of what he defines as a "northification process," which was deliberately initiated in Western Scandinavia to legitimize, among other issues, late medieval ownership of land and socio-political leadership.

The second section, entitled "The English Connection," is devoted to representations of Scandinavia from the perspective of some notable twelfth-century English historians. Rodney Thomson analyzes William of Malmesbury's use of Scandinavian material in his Gesta regum Anglorum and Gesta pontificum Anglorum. He suggests that William might have collected information on Danish and Norwegian people and events through personal contacts and oral communications rather than from written sources, and notices the presence of the same oral material in several Icelandic sagas. In the following essay, Michael Gelting demonstrates the dependence...