Prior to the high Middle Ages, the Baltic Rim was largely terra incognita-but by the late Middle Ages, it was home to diverse small and large communities. But the Baltic Rim was not simply the place those people lived-it was also an imagined space through which they defined themselves and their identities. This book traces the transformation of the Baltic Rim in this period through a focus on the self-image of a number of communities: urban and regional, cultic, missionary, legal, and political. Contributors look at the ways these communities defined themselves in relationship to other groups, how they constructed their identities and customs, and what held them together or tore them apart.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Editors’ Preface
- Introduction
- Imagined Communities on the Baltic Rim, From the Eleventh to Fifteenth Centuries
- Visions of Community
- Imagining the Baltic
- Mental Mapping in the Works of Adam of Bremen and Saxo Grammaticus, Eleventh – Thirteenth Centuries
- Discourses of Communion
- Abbot William of Æbelholt and Saxo Grammaticus: Imagining the Christian Danish Community, Early Thirteenth Century
- Envisioning a Political Community
- Peasants and Swedish Men in Vernacular Rhyme Chronicles, Late Fifteenth Century
- Cultic and Missionary Communities
- Communities of Devotion across the Boundaries
- Women and Religious Bonds on the Baltic Rim and in Central Europe, Eleventh – Twelfth Centuries
- Risk Societies on the Frontier
- Missionary Emotional Communities in the Southern Baltic, Eleventh – Thirteenth Centuries
- Expanding Communities
- Henry of Livonia on the Making of a Christian Colony, Early Thirteenth Century
- An Imaginary Saint for an Imagined Community
- St. Henry and the Creation of Christian Identity in Finland, Thirteenth – Fifteenth Centuries
- Legal and Urban Communities
- The Making of Legal Communities
- Royal, Aristocratic, and Local Visions in Sweden and Gotland, Thirteenth – Fourteenth Centuries
- Urban Community and Consensus
- Brotherhood and Communalism in Medieval Novgorod
- Urban Community and Social Unrest
- Semantics of Conflict in Fourteenth-Century Lübeck
- The Baltic Rim: A View From Afar
- Norway, Sweden, and Novgorod
- Scandinavian Perceptions of the Russians, Late Twelfth – Early Fourteenth Centuries
- Transient Borders
- The Baltic Viewed from Northern Iceland in the Mid-Fifteenth Century
- Afterword
- Imagined Emotions for Imagined Communities
- List of Abbreviations
- General index
- List of Figures
- Figure 1 Place-names mentioned in the book
- Figure 2 Marriages of children of Bolesław the Wrymouth and his son, Mieszko III, with members of Scandinavian and Pomeranian ruling houses
- Figure 3 Familial relations of Inge the Elder and Helena’s daughters
- Figure 4 Emotion Words in the Chronicon Livoniae
- Figure 5 Law code provinces in Sweden, fourteenth century