HOW GLOBAL WAS the premodern North? I intend to address this question from a military point of view and to discuss whether a global perspective is applicable to the period and region in that respect. In the premodern era, warfare was a central pursuit among many European polities, and the expansion of the early modern military market is often associated with the growth of centralized states. Knut J. V. Jespersen argues that, before the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), wars in the Baltic Sea region had been “fought in splendid isolation” and that it was not until this conflict that the region was really connected with the international European military–political system. Given that the subsequent decline of mercenary armies in the eighteenth century seems connected to state consolidation and the development of standing national armies, the global window of military migration in the Baltic region is largely associated with the seventeenth century. In this essay, however, I want to investigate whether a global perspective on the Baltic region is also valid during the preceding period of military migration. For my purposes, this region comprises the territories and polities touching on the shores of the Baltic Sea, although the Holy Roman Empire, Poland, Lithuania, and Muscovy also had vast inland territories, which I do not include.

During the early Middle Ages, centrifugal forces in the Baltic region promoted the outward migration of Vikings and other warriors. Danes and Norwegians travelled to western Europe and the British isles. Swedes travelled along the eastern rivers to the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea, and further south to Constantinople, where the Varangian guard served the Byzantine emperor. The rich early findings of Arab coin and ceramics in Scandinavia testify to the intensive connections with distant regions. Some hypotheses also locate the geographic origins of Goths, Lombards, and other migrating military federations of late antiquity to the southern Baltic. It is unknown whether these military migrations were due to social, economic, or political push-or-pull factors, but the centrifugal trend is quite clear: many more warriors left the Baltic region than arrived there.

During the later Middle Ages, however, the tide turned and centripetal forces drew soldiers back into the region. The earliest cause was the Northern Crusades, which enticed knights from western Germany, the Low Countries, and Denmark to Pomerania, Prussia, and Livonia.

According to the twelfth-century tale by Chrétien de Troyes, the knight Yvain lived wild in the forest, naked, killing animals, and eating raw meat because he did not remember any of his previous acts and had gone mad. So, eating uncooked meat and going without clothes demonstrated behaviour inappropriate for a mentally healthy human being, and if someone adopted this behaviour it was because he had forgotten everything he had done throughout his life and had lost awareness of who he was. He would only revert to behaviour considered normal when he regained the knowledge of who he was, in other words, when he returned to his identity. The starting point is thus the individual's own identity.

Identity of the Individual

The core of the medieval human being was thus identity; being aware of who one was and where one came from and so be able to adopt adequate behaviour and determine a future path in one's life. Does this suppose an awareness of the individual in itself? It is highly significant that historians do not agree on the elements that indicate an assumption of an individual identity. In fact, there is a whole series of elements that, taken together, especially between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, highlight the progressive growth of awareness of an individual's personal identity.

Firstly, there was the spread of Roman law around Europe in the twelfth century, arising from an academic artificiality that guaranteed it would be balanced and fair, and this supplied a homogenizing legal basis adaptable to every reality. This set out the legal elements for each unique individual, with his rights, duties, and responsibilities, under relevant legislative bodies, whilst not forgetting, at a lower level, the customs based on the “consent of the individuals themselves.”

IN AN ARTICLE concerning the formation of Switzerland, Guy Marchal describes what he calls “the answer of the peasants,” their response to the dominant seigneurial discourse of mockery and deprecation. The original Swiss rural cantons constituted a nucleus of rustic freedom in a world of lordship and hierarchy. It is of course difficult to reconstruct this “answer,” the way medieval peasants saw their own virtues or justified their demands, but what follows is an effort to sketch a view of their situation set against the considerably more obvious and prolific attitudes of the lords, who dominated, but did not completely control, the construction of social imagery.

The Seigneurial Portrayal of the Peasant

A vast literature survives from the seigneurial side describing the uncouth and contemptible nature of the peasantry. This varies in quantity by period, becoming much more common in the late medi eval era of social upheaval. Such texts also vary greatly depending on geo graphical region and culture. Literary genres such as satires, comi-cal stories, and didactic treatises depicting peasants as stupid, coarse, and ludicrous form a significant part of German literature and are represented in English, French, and Italian sources. In Germany there was an entire class of medi eval literature known as Bauernschwank (plays and poems involving comical peasant characters), and the tendency to feature laughable rustics characterizes plays written in mercantile cities (notably Nürnberg) to celebrate Carnival. In France and Provence, the pastourelle, a poem in which a knight attempts to seduce (or, failing that, rape), a peasant girl was end-lessly elaborated. But in Catalan literature, peasants rarely appear. One would hardly know from the magnificent legacy of medi eval Catalan writing that the territory was convulsed by peasant agitation and rebellion in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the Castilian realm, the situation is also peculiar. A nation that in its literary Golden Age would give rise to the most enduring peasant character, Sancho Panza, and one of whose greatest playwrights, Lope de Vega, invented over one thousand rustic characters, produced almost nothing about peasants in its literary works before 1450.

Whatever the variation among European nations, one can speak of an overall set of seigneurial and clerical ideas of the peasant that emphasized his lowliness and so his suitability for agricultural labour and exploitation by the privileged.

ON A GRASSY sheep farm in Igaliku, a small settlement in southern Greenland, reclines a perimeter of red stones. These lichen-covered ruins huddle in view of an inlet of the North Atlantic and craggy, cloud-cloaked peaks. This is the footprint of Garðar Cathedral, the episcopal seat of Norse Greenland. It has been abandoned since the fifteenth century, when a colonial venture spanning five hundred years mysteriously ended. During a period of expansion and success in the settlement during the twelfth century, the older Garðar Cathedral was replaced with a new building, one with a much larger footprint, perhaps to welcome a new bishop and the growing congregation. This second Garðar Cathedral had a differentiated chancel and two chapels. The sandstone used in the church's twelfth-century construction was quarried locally in the nearby mountains. Dedicated to St. Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors, it had a bell tower and windows of coloured glass. Though there were at least seventeen other small, privately owned churches in Norse Greenland, the cathedral marked the spiritual centre of the community and signalled the ambitions of the local elite.

The Walruses at the Altar

When Poul Nørland excavated the church in 1929, in addition to the human remains in the churchyard and those in the chapels, he discovered the remains of other Greenland inhabitants, their heads aligned on the East–West axis like all the people interred there. Buried in neat rows, twenty to thirty walrus skulls were discovered along the eastern gable of the cathedral chancel, all with their tusks removed. In addition, four to five Narwhal skulls were buried in the sanctified ground of the churchyard beside their settler neighbours. Initially, Nørland interpreted these rows of skulls as evidence of an earlier, pre-Christian site, and the team of researchers led by Karin Frei later suggested that these were incorporated into the cemetery when it expanded into nearby refuse heaps. However, the dating of these skulls to the late eleventh and early twelfth century, as well as their position in relationship to the church, aligned with the architecture, suggest that their interment was rather part of the ritual dimensions of the Christian site. This Arctic intervention within the footprint of the cathedral actualizes an encounter between the imported liturgical space and the nonhuman presence with which it shared the land.

SINCE ANTIQUITY, MAN has used names to assert his individual identity, which, in turn, distinguished him from his peers. In some cultures, a name was given to a person in accordance with one of their physical or spiritual attributes, and thus it was not bestowed on them at birth, but when they had started to mature or show a certain predisposition or skill. Therefore, it was not a stable name and it could vary throughout the person's life. However, as societies started to evolve culturally, the name given to a person became more in keeping with a wish than a reality, that is to say, a name with symbolic content—which, as religion gained prominence in the history of humanity, was mainly religious—was bestowed on the child at baptism, with the hope that its meaning served as a role model or spiritual inspiration.

In the biblical world, we see how this choice is made before birth and how, when the Lord's messengers announce to Abraham that his wife Sara, who is an old woman eavesdropping on the conversation, will be a mother, she starts to laugh. It is then that the angels tell Abraham that the child will be called Isaac, which means laughter. This is not a unique case and, as we see in the sacred books of the Jews, there are many other similar onomastic explanations, for example, Moses, which means “saved by the waters.”

Therefore, we must keep in mind that in ancient times, an individual's name was quite original, and that its repetition solely arose from the need to name successive generations. Hence the inspiration for the project that lies behind the present chapter, because the bestowing of a personal name, a first name according to the Christian religion, sheds light on each period's way of thinking and even different family structures.

An Approach to a Medieval Repertoire of Names in the Iberian Peninsula

As Jaime de Salazar Ancha indicates in his Manual de Genealogía Española, the Spanish traditional onomastic repertoire is formed primarily from three main sources: Latin, which was common in early Roman Hispanics; Germanic, and specifically Visigoth onomastics; and Jewish, and more particularly biblical, which has entered Spanish onomastics through religious devotion.

IN THE TWELFTH to fourteenth centuries, a genre of specialized geographical literature began to emerge in Scandinavia: a series of descriptions of the inhabited world, or its parts, based on a continental European chorographic tradition—pri-marily the Etymologiae by Isidorus of Seville and Honorius of Autun's encyclopaedia Imago mundi—but also on local knowledge of the topography of northern and eastern Europe. Alongside these Old Norse writings, geographical descriptions also occur in Old Norse chronicles and sagas. Studying the geographical descriptions in twelfth-cen-tury Scandinavian Latin texts, Lars Boje Mortensen concludes that the medieval geo-graphical imagination had been based on older textual predecessors, rather than on personal acquaintance with the territories in question. Indeed, the influence of ancient authors predominated even in the descriptions of lands that had not been familiar to them, as manifested in the structure and presentation of geographical and ethnographic material in these later works. Northern geography was thus subsumed into the learned discourse. At the same time, Mortensen rightly emphasizes that, by the twelfth century, the geography of northern territories was well known in practice, so that the need arose “to explain the region in writing,” mainly in Latin, within the framework of the centuries-old Latin written culture, because the historians who sought to chronicle the northern periphery of Europe aimed at including their region into the common Christian space, and could not do so without the basis of written geography.

The twelfth-century northern scholars who were the first to write in Latin were the anonymous author of the Historia Norwegie (History of Norway); a Norwegian known as Theodoricus the Monk, author of the Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagiensium (The Ancient History of the Norwegian Kings); a Dane, Saxo Grammaticus, the author of the Gesta Danorum (Deeds of the Danes); Ælnoth, an Anglo-Saxon monk who, as a Danish transplant, authored the Gesta Swenomagni regis et filiorum eius (Deeds of Sweyn the Great and His Sons); and the Norwegian author of the introduction to Passio Olaui (Passion of Saint Olaf, that is, Olaf II Haraldson, king of Norway from 1015 to 1028). All of them faced the task of creating a textual map of the northern regions, and all had to rely on ancient texts even though ancient authors either did not know anything about the North, or were not at all interested in it.

THE CONCEPT OF identity, originating from the social sciences, particularly psycho-logy, and even the experimental sciences, especially psychiatry, has been imported into the historical discipline during recent decades. Therefore, any attempt to define this concept calls for insight into the origin of its creation and consolidation in the disciplinary, academic, and scholarly panorama.

In this chapter I analyze the growing importance acquired by the concept of identity in historiography. This concept has been defined as “the process of construction of meaning on the basis of a cultural attribute, or a related set of cultural attributes, that is given priority over other sources of meaning.” The historiographical concept of identity is then closely tied to that of culture, and is therefore linked to the current prevailing historiographical trend, the new cultural history. Hence, in recent decades, history has been enhanced by means of incorporating and assimilating the concept of culture, originating from symbolic anthropology, and that of identity, from psychology and psychiatry. This new conceptual marriage has replaced both the grand narratives of postwar paradigms, the most radical postmodernist positions, and the linguistic turn of the 1970s and 1980s. Historiography has ceased to be concerned with analyzing rigid social and economic structures and with the anti-referential excesses of a radical postmodernism, and is increasingly placing greater emphasis on describing, analyzing, and inter preting “the mechanisms created by an individual or social group in order to recognize themselves and be recognized by the rest of the social conglomerate.” This approach allows resolution of the trend towards fragmentation in contemporary knowledge with reasonable certainty.

Firstly, we must start from the fact that the analysis and application of the concept of identity refers to two key realities in the study of history: individuality (which in much of academic literature written in English is identified by the term “self”) and collectivity. This dual facet of the concept is important, because both individuality and collectivity bring out and emphasize each other according to the historiographical moment in time. Broadly speaking, from the 1930s to the 1970s, the historical discipline became polarized in the study of social processes, more linked to the collective, by means of the emergence of trends grouped together by Lawrence Stone under the name of “paradigms”— namely, Marxism, Structuralism, and Quantitativism—in his programmatic article on the revival of narrative in 1979.

THE CONFLICT-RIDDEN MIDDLE AGES, which brought into being the feudal system that was abolished by the revolutionary Assemblée nationale in August 1793, was a period based on seigneurial rule. It was dominated by the nobility and clergy, who were often arbitrary, and even ruthless, in their application of the ius primae noctis (“right of the first night”) and, according to Voltaire, included “friars who teach, argue, govern, plot, and burn at the stake, those who do not agree with them.” The heartwarming Middle Ages, rediscovered by Romanticism in the first decades of the nineteenth century, were much appreciated for the generous gallantry and deep spirituality of their knights, though we should not forget that these knights were also responsible for imposing this same “feudal tyranny.” It was a time of increasingly powerful lords. As Lord Lytton once observed, “the Church and the king wish[ed] to strengthen themselves by the gentry.” In such a Middle Ages, marked by feudal nobility, it is understandable that the bourgeoisie, who appropriated the French revolution8 and effectively took control of Europe, particularly from 1830 onwards, came to define a liberal society, allowing it to achieve levels of growth and prosperity that were able to correct the weaknesses inherited from the medieval period.

This liberal bourgeoisie located its own roots in the Middle Ages, but as a combative seed of change which had steered that era into the present. Using this logic, the emergence of cities and of urban communes during the medi eval period could be explained in terms of the confrontation between members of the bourgeoisie who fought against the feudal lords10 to obtain greater freedoms, similarly to the revolutions of the nineteenth century. The future world was a victory for urban dwellers, who “suffocated the feudal aristocracy, whose wealth was less than that of the merchant and industrial class, in terms of enlightenment and regularity of custom: in terms of social power.” Royal abuses were also reduced thanks to the firmness of the bourgeoisie, who did not think twice about personally confronting arrogant monarchs, as shown by the figures adorn-ing the pantheon of nineteenth-century bourgeois mytho logy, such as Etienne Marcel in France and Joan Fivaller in Catalonia.

MORE THAN HALF of Scandinavia's land area consists of boreal forest. This environment is characterized by a hilly and undulating topography interspersed by numerous lakes, rivers, streams, and mires. From the perspective of today´s urban-centred world, or if compared to the major waterways and coastal ports where connectivity and global encounters are clearly apparent, the Scandinavian inlands appear marginal. This mistaken notion, we argue, is one of the main reasons for a general scarcity of research on the history of inland Scandinavia, a fate shared by other so-called marginal landscapes in Europe. Although archaeological research has repeatedly demonstrated connections between the exploitation of frontier “outlands,” on the one hand, and agricultural plains and coastal areas on the other, the boreal forests have hitherto been considered of negligible importance for understanding the larger societal developments of the past. Not only do they lack the presence of social elites in the archaeological record and produce little written documentation prior to 1500 CE, the first permanent agrarian settlements have generally been perceived as belonging to the Viking Age (ca. 750–1050 CE) or the central and later Middle Ages (ca. 1050–1520 CE), and their presence has been explained as a result of population growth in the central agricultural regions and the new technologies that facilitated farming in forested areas. In consequence, their history has largely been written on the basis of an anachronistic archaeology looking ahead to the historical and ethnographic situation of the early modern and modern eras.

This view, however, is now being challenged by a growing body of archaeological data supplemented by an increasing number of studies based on modern methods. For example, recent studies have shown an intensified hunt for terrestrial mammals starting around the fourth century CE, followed by a subsequent exploitation of marine mammals in the following centuries. These developments are contemporary with indications of inland agricultural expansion during the late Roman Iron Age, extending along the main river valleys that connected the region with the Gulf of Bothnia in the east and the Atlantic in the west. At several places in the boreal forest, palynological studies suggest that agricultural settlements with permanent “field-and-meadow systems” were established during the early or middle part of the Iron Age, emerging along with the development of iron production.

WHEREAS RECENT DECADES have seen a noticeable increase in articles and books on medi eval masculinities, the same cannot be said regarding femininities. The very term “femininity” is problematic, because it has always been associated with essen-tialist conceptions of womanhood, typical of patriarchal societies. As Michelle Rosaldo has noted, in such societies, to become a man is considered an achievement while “wom-anhood […] is more of a given for the female”; as such, there are “few ways of expressing the differences among women.” However, since the 1960s, both Feminism and Women's History have challenged these conceptions, demonstrating that femininity is not an intrinsic condition of all people born with female genitals, but rather a social construct. Thus, we should not speak of femininity in the singular form, but of plural femininities, varying according to time and civilization, as we should be sensitive to the fact that in the same period of time and in the same cultural space there could be varied femininities, resulting from the interaction of gender with other differentiating factors such as religion and ethnicity, class, age, or even the personality of the individual woman, itself a product of the permanent negotiations between each of them (her impulses, her desires, her ability or inability to suppress or sublimate them) and the surrounding society.

This last aspect is the hardest to perceive, as confessions by medi eval women so rarely survive, disclosing their private thoughts and intimate conflicts; nevertheless, some do remain that I shall address later. Women's History has also rescued from oblivion, or from an incorrect attribution of authorship, literary or other writings by women which reveal their notions of what a woman was, or should be. Better known, however, are the models that the clerics of medi eval Western Christian society presented women, to abide by them or to reject them: the models of Eve, the sinner; Mary Magdalene, the repentant sinner; and Mary, the Virgin Mother. In this chapter, I argue that, compelling as they might seem, these clerical models were not without ambiguities which allowed Christian women a certain agency and even promoted the empowerment of some of them.

IN THE MIDDLE Ages, from Baghdad to Barcelona, we find many minority religious communities: all over the Muslim world, Jews and Christians lived as dhimmis, protected and subordinated minorities. In Byzantium and all over Latin Europe, Jewish communities lived in a society which alternated between tolerance and persecution of them. Some Muslims lived in Christian kingdoms (in Sicily, in the Latin Orient, and in certain Christian Hispanic kingdoms). The Muslim and Christian sovereigns of the Middle Ages claimed that their power derived from God. Caliphs, emperors, popes, and kings used religious arguments to reinforce and justify their power.

These religious ideologies expressed the inferiority of all those people who did not proclaim the majority faiths. This religious inferiority consisted of a legal and social subordination but, at the same time, we can find instructions for tolerance towards members of different religions within society in the Christian and Muslim traditions. How can we define the position of the minority in these societies?

I would like to look at two examples in order to explain how these jurists from the minority communities perceived their subordination. First, the point of view of a Muslim Mufti on whether it is legal for Muslims to reside in Norman Sicily. The second example concerns the view of Pope Gregory IX and his confessor, the canonist Raymond of Penyafort, on legal problems of Christians residing in Tūnis during the thirteenth century.

First, let us focus on the Sicilian question. Sicily was conquered by the Normans (1061–1091) partly through alliances with the Muslim Qaids who lived on the island. There were many Muslims in Sicily during the twelfth century: farmers, soldiers, but also many important figures in the court of the king (administrators, officials). The Andalusian traveller Ibn Jubayr (there in 1185) has left us a striking description.

The document we are interested in is a fatwa, a juridical consultation in which a question is submitted to a mufti, who gives his opinion based on religious and legal sources (and including the opinions of other scholars before him). In the Maghreb, the Malikite legal school prevailed. AlWansharisi (fl. sixteenth century) assembled a large collection of fatwas especially from the Andalusian and Maghrebi muftis.

SCHOLARS WHOSE RESEARCH focuses on the study of arms and armour have tended to shy away from the analysis of literary texts as points of comparison or clarification, while scholars of knighthood in literature have likewise tended to shy away from archaeological analyses of arms, armour, and the material culture of the chivalric past as a point of reference for their own work. This apparent disconnect can be remedied by studying what I have called in another study the full materiality of medieval and renaissance chivalric culture. In the case of chivalric identity in particular, an intellectual tension can be created by seeking one identity and essentializing it through one approach. The armoured knight, while he can of course be studied from a single angle, is complex enough that the confluence of seemingly disparate approaches to the study of chivalric identity can yield results that present a more balanced overall view of what it meant to be a knight in the Middle Ages.

Chivalry as a political institution, like other political institutions that make and shape Western culture, has been treated seriously and extensively by modern scholars, and a rich bibliography of books and articles informs our knowledge and understanding of the institution. The same cannot necessarily be said of the practical and technological milieu in which the knights operated, and although they were at the epicentre of the medieval chivalric diaspora, they have often fallen victim to emotive portraits based on erroneous visions of, and assumptions about, the past. An example of this paradox can be seen in a 1998 book by Constance Brittain Bouchard on the institution of chivalry in medieval France, which is generally welldocumented, and yet when the author discusses knightly practices she perpetuates the fallacy, without any supporting evidence, that “Late medieval tournament armor was so heavy that participants often had to be hoisted onto their horses by cranes and tied into place because of the damage that would result simply from falling off.” The fact that the author does not cite a source for this assertion under scores the reality that there is no material, visual, or documentary evidence to support it, and all of the evidence that does exist, without exception, points to the exact opposite, namely, that fully armoured men-at-arms were able to mount and dismount with agility and ease.

ONE OF NORTHEASTERN Europe's major medieval historical and archaeological sites is the trading port of Staraya Ladoga, “Old” Ladoga, located on the western bank of the Volkhov River and twelve kilometres from the southern shore of Lake Ladoga in what is now Russia. This settlement remained attractive for Scandinavian traders, craftsmen, and farmers throughout the Viking Age (eighth to eleventh centuries) and probably beyond, because ships could sail from the Baltic Sea through the Gulf of Finland and into Lake Lagoda, seventy-four kilometres inland, via the Neva River. From there, they could proceed to the mouth of the Volkhov, some hundred kilometres along the southern shore of the lake.

Ladoga is mentioned several times in the Primary Chronicle of Rus’ (compiled in the early twelfth century) and in Icelandic sagas, where it is known as Aldejgjuborg. In the early eleventh century, the Prince of Kiev, Yaroslav the Wise (Mudry), ceded any regional claim on Ladoga to his wife, Princess Ingegerd Olofsdotter of Sweden, creating a separate jarlsriki or earldom. After she died, in 1050, Ladoga became part of Novgorod territory at some point; however, this phase of its history is difficult to verify through archaeological evidence alone. In the occupation layers above wooden buildings from the mid-tenth century, glass bracelets and lead seals that are characteristic of the Early Rus’ period (twelfth to thirteenth centuries) have been discovered. Meanwhile, the Chronicle of Novgorod records that, in 1105, the Novgorodians, led by Prince Mstislav Vladimirovich “made war against Ladoga.” What, then, was the geopolitical status of Ladoga during the fifty years after Ingegerd's death?

In this article, I will argue that these finds, coupled with the chronicle's claim, should be interpreted as evidence for the end of the Ladoga jarlskiri and its autonomy, as do the finds of lead seals from Novgorod and the building of a new and larger stone fortress. Prior to that time, and perhaps even under Novogorod influence, Staraya Ladoga functioned as an important emporium of the global North.

According to dendrochronological data, the first wooden living structures at Ladoga are dated no later than 753 CE. The focal area of the settlement was situated on the lower part of the riverbank, hidden from the Volkhov by a coastal dune.

THE INTERDISCIPLINARY ENDEAVOUR of mapping literature has produced multiple anthologies, articles, and infrastructure resources addressing a variety of research questions on literary cartography and spatiality. A more specific inquiry into the geographies and spatiality of medieval narrative, especially romances, has likewise gained much scholarly attention. Interestingly, these two groups of scholars have arrived at almost identical conclusions: spatial descriptions within medieval romance and other literary genres are best described as geographically opaque and vague.Moreover, such descriptive maps, for the most part, represent strings of place-names arranged in a linear fashion and thus have much in common with the mapping tradition of contemporary itineraries.In this article, I argue that it is necessary to analyze all kinds of spatial references, not only place-names, in order to gain a proper understanding of spatiality across medieval literary corpora. Furthermore, any such analysis has to include spatial constructions: that is, descriptions of the relations between spatial references, however scarce these might be, because the relational aspects of geographical descriptions give unique insight into the texts’ coordinate systems and wider medieval perceptions of geography and the surrounding world. Thus, the present article complements the existing scholarship on literary spatiality which has been heavily focused on landscapes, topography, and/or named places (especially within the literary GIS tradition) and offers a more nuanced, theoretically and methodologically informed way of approaching spatiality in a text, with or without employment of GIS (Geographic Information Systems), through the investigation of multiple categories of spatial references and spatial constructions.

This article also aims to show how geographical space is linguistically rendered in medieval texts of different genres, and what this linguistic information can reveal about perceptions of geography and space in medieval narrative. To fulfil its purpose, it will answer two research questions. First, what language resources (spatial references and spatial constructions) are used to convey spatial information in two Old Swedish texts: an original vernacular composition, Erikskrönikan (The Chronicle of Duke Erik); and a translation, Själens tröst (Consolation of the Soul)? Second, in what ways do the spatial profiles of these texts differ, and why? Are these differences persistent in other texts belonging to the same genres in the East Norse literary corpus, rhymed chronicles and devotional works respectively?

THIS QUOTATION FROM Fabrizio Cruciani expresses the efforts made in theatre studies, over the last seventy years, to create an original methodological approach no longer focused on the central position of a dramatic text, as the field has been conceived since the nineteenth century. The result of these efforts is the identification of practical methods capable of overcoming the specific contradiction of theatre studies, which is the lack of a hermeneutic object because, being an event, theatre is by its nature ephemeral. Clues can be found later, whether literary, documentary, figurative, narrative, or financial, but these cannot, in any way, restore the integrity of the event.

Unlike the description of festivities and rituals, or efforts to reconstruct archaeologically possible theatrical productions of well-known dramatic texts, always somewhat hypothetical due to the fragmentary nature of the documents, “new” theatre history, developed in Italian universities since the mid-1960s, has tried to define new links and well-conceived methodologies, while also undertaking research into production processes.

This new hermeneutic horizon gave value to the performing arts as a system and network. To this end, it is important to individualize and study the institutions that promote or support the performance, symbolic languages, procedures, modalities of communication, the use of space, and literary and figurative elaborations (recognizing the contiguous forms of expression and indoctrination developed by local political and ecclesiastical cultures: preaching, literature, and typo logy, among others). This study also includes analyzing the purpose and type of spectacle, to enhance perspectives and enlarge the quantity and quality of questions asked of the sources, rather than just analyzing the sources themselves.

The latest research into medieval and premodern theatre has contributed new cognitive elements to better understand our idea of medieval festivities. At the same time, it has made more pressing the problem of distinguishing between theatrical acts and simple rituals or ludic events. The specific notion of theatre has become increasingly more extensive and overcomes the identification with the dramaturgic work to include fluid, composited, and varied acts, rather than mere dramatic performances.

THIS CHAPTER LOOKS at a Muslim polymath, Ibn Ḥazm (384–556 AH/994–1064 CE), in the period after the abolition of the Umayyad caliphate of Córdoba and the formation of many competing polities in the first Taifa period. In spite of his loyalty to the Cordoban Umayyad caliphate, Ibn Ḥazm abandoned Mālikism, the legal school favoured by the Umayyads. Instead, he attached himself to Ẓāhirism, a legal trend based on a literalist approach to the sources of Revelation. I propose in this chapter a new explanation for this move, one that highlights how Ḥāhirism fitted into Ibn Ḥazm's attempt to preserve the court culture in which he had grown up, with its emphasis on reason and diffidence towards charisma.

Ibn Ḥazm: Political Problems, Legal Solutions

In the medieval Islamic West, in the fourth (AH) through the tenth (CE) centuries, Andalusi society was characterized by a strong, long-established state and the support of a powerful network of specialists in religious learning, principally jurists. The collective memory engendered by these specialists provided continuity in religious knowledge (ʽilm) beginning with the arrival of Islam in the Iberian Peninsula in the second through the seventh century up to their own time. This continuity was related to how they managed the knowledge of the Revelation and the prophetic legacy as a means of assuring salvation in the afterlife, for both ruler and the ruled, by leading them along the straight path during this life.1 A different kind of society or societies could be found throughout most of the far western Maghreb (present-day Morocco), where there was no similar network of religious scholars until the Almoravid period and especially during the Almohad period (sixth through the seventh (AH)–twelfth through the thirteenth (CE) centuries) and where it was relatively common to find messianic or saintly figures charged with managing both the sacred sphere and conflicts among tribes. In some cases, these figures were able to provide the initial impetus for the creation of states.

In al-Andalus, however, these charismatic figures rarely succeeded in forming lasting political structures. The reasons for their relative failure are many, among which we may mention the difficulty in recruiting an army in al-Andalus—a task facilitated in North Africa by the tribal context—as well as the existence of a deep anti-charismatic tendency among Andalusi religious scholars.

PAUL ZUMTHOR ARGUED for the absence, at least until the fifteenth century, of autobio graphical writing during the Middle Ages, that is, the absence of a discourse of the “I,” whose reality was seen as part of lived experience. Zumthor cited troubadour song as an example of “a mental world where autobio graphy is out of the question,” a poetry of rhetorical formalization in which the statements that structure the song are not even articulated in a logical sequence of progression or causality, but refer, in a self-contained, disconnected manner, to a virtual model present in the public's memory: the ethical and aesthetic ideal troubadours called fin’amors. The aim of this chapter is to draw attention to a series of twelfth- and thirteenth-century French narrative texts, which, by representing the act of poetic creation on the fictional plane, do in fact link it to the memory of experience gained by a specific subject and to the expression and affirmation of individual identity.

The Identity of the Individual in Romance Literature

Here a brief introductory reflection on individual identity in medieval Romance literature is necessary. In a text dedicated to subjectivity in literature, Charmaine Lee reminded us that medieval literature devotes little space to a construction of individual identity, either in the case of epic poetry, which “cannot, because of its own nature, be a personal genre,” or in that of lyrical poetry, since the troubadour, despite expressing himself in the first person, sings not so much for a lady to whom he expresses his love as for an audience of troubadours (entenedors) capable of appreciating subtle variations in the expression of an amorous rhetorical code they all know and share. Maria Luisa Meneghetti, for her part, related the scant attention given to individual identity to the general anonymity of literature, at least throughout the twelfth century. This is true, particularly if we think of the chanson de geste and the earliest romans antics, narrations in octosyllables inspired by classical epics and still very close to the spirit of the epic matter. The author of a chanson de geste, in adopting the jongleur's mask, appears as the mere transmitter of the events narrated, while the first romanciers hid behind another mask, that of the translator, taking advantage of the authority emanating from the Latin source.