European Christians think of their religion as the “normal” expression of Christianity, in contrast to such ethnic offshoots as the Maronite, Coptic, or Russian Orthodox faiths. In fact, however, as ...James Russell here shows, Europeanized Christianity is highly adapted, arising from the early interaction of Mediterranean Christianity with Northern European culture. This book takes a close look at the ways in which Christianity changed in order to win the allegiance of the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon peoples. Russell argues that the Northern peoples were far more resistant to conversion than the disaffected, urban populace of the Roman Empire had been. Unlike their Mediterranean counterparts, the Northerners displayed a high level of social solidarity. As a result, Russell contends, considerable cultural accommodation was necessary for Christianity to take hold in the Germanic context. In the process of exploring the nature of these changes, Russell develops a suggestive new model of the ways in which religious change occurs in any culture.
What makes English literature English ? This question inspires Stephen Harris's wide-ranging study of Old English literature. From Bede in the eighth century to Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth, ...Harris explores the intersections of race and literature before the rise of imagined communities. Harris examines possible configurations of communities, illustrating dominant literary metaphors of race from Old English to its nineteenth-century critical reception. Literary voices in the England of Bede understood the limits of community primarily as racial or tribal, in keeping with the perceived divine division of peoples after their languages, and the extension of Christianity to Bede's Germanic neighbours was effected in part through metaphors of family and race. Harris demonstrates how King Alfred adapted Bede in the ninth century; how both exerted an effect on Archbishop Wulfstan in the eleventh; and how Old English poetry speaks to images of race.
European culture has been greatly influenced by the Christian Church and Greek and Roman culture. However, the peoples of Europe’s remote past, whom the Greeks, Romans, and their medieval heirs ...called the «barbarians», also left their mark. Closely examining ancient and medieval narratives and the codifications of laws, this thoughtfully conducted comparative study sheds light on the illiterate societies of the early Germanic and Slavic peoples. The picture that emerges is one of communities built on kinship, neighborly, and tribal relations, where decision making, judgement, and punishment were carried out collectively, and the distinction between the sacred and profane was unknown.
From Goths to Varangians Line Bjerg, John H. Lind, Soren Michael Sindbaek
2013, 2013-08-31, Letnik:
15
eBook
With a multidisciplinary approach by archaeologists, historians and related sciences by leading scholars from England, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, USA and the Scandinavian and Baltic countries, this ...anthology examines the cross cultural ties between the Baltic and the Black Sea Area from Late Antiquity through the Viking Age to the Middle Ages. With articles ranging from the lively exchange between Southern Scandinavia and the Goths in the Pontic Area in Late Antiquity, to the famous Varangian Guard consisting of Scandinavians at the Royal Court in Byzantine in the Late Viking Age, the book provides an overview of important sources and new research into the significance of long range relations and cross cultural interaction between Scandinavia, the Slavic lands and the Black Sea Region.
