Authorship, Worldview, and Identity in Medieval Europe

What did medieval authors know about their world? Were they parochial and focused on just their monastery, town, or kingdom? Or were they aware of the broader medieval Europe that modern historians write about? This collection brings the focus back to medieval authors to see how they described their world. While we see that each author certainly had their own biases, the vast majority of them did not view the world as constrained to their small piece of it. Instead, they talked about the wider world, and often they had informants or textual sources that informed them about the world, even if they did not visit it themselves. This volume shows that they also used similar ideas to create space and identity - whether talking about the desert, the holy land, or food practices in their texts. By examining medieval authors and their own perceptions of their world, this collection offers a framework for discussions of medieval Europe in the twenty-first century.

Christian Raffensperger is the Kenneth E. Wray Chair in the Humanities at Wittenberg University, as well as a Professor and Chair of History. His work focuses on connecting eastern Europe into the larger medieval European world, as seen in Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus' and the Medieval World (2012) and Conflict, Bargaining, and Kinship Networks in Medieval Eastern Europe (2018).

1. Introduction - the medieval world then and now Part 1: A Wider World 2. The Horizons of Gregory of Tours 3. When World Views Collide? The Travel Narratives of Haraldr Sigurðarson of Norway 4. Concubinage in New Contexts: Interfaith Borrowings and the Rulers of Castile-León in the High Middle Ages 5. Finding Byzantine-Norman Common Ground:Classics and Christianity in Tzetzes' Encomium to Loukia 6. Imagined Geographies in Early Rus' 7. The Globe in Thirteenth-Century Hispania: Archbishop Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada and his World 8. The World View of Marco Polo's Devisament dou monde: Commercial Marvels, Silk Route Nostalgia and Global Empire in the Late Middle Ages 9. Treasuries as Windows to the Medieval World: San Isidoro de León and Saint Blaise at Braunschweig Part 2: Neighbors and Neighborhoods 10. Adam's of Bremen view of the Polabian Slavs 11. Into the Wild West: Two Twelfth-Century Clerics' View of Medieval Brittany 12. An Irish Sea King?: Ethnicity and Legitimacy in the Vita Griffini filii Conani and Historia Gruffud vab Kenan 13. Saxo and the Slavs 14. Is there any other world? Imagination of the outside world in the medieval historiography of the Czech lands based on the chronicles Cosmas of Prague, so called Dalimil and Pribík Pulkava of Radenín 15.'Und gras vor spise zeren': Migration, Fermentation, and the Map of Civilization in the Baltic Crusades 16. Bulgaria - the new Byzantium: Political ideology and self-perception in a medieval Balkan State 17. Medieval Welsh Ethnic Nicknames and Implications for the Welsh View of their Geopolitical Context, 1050 - 1400