Visions of North in premodern Europe / edited by Dolly Jørgensen and Virginia Langum.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

Jørgensen, Dolly, 1972- editor.

Langum, Virginia, editor.

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Series:

Cursor mundi (Turnhout, Belgium) ; v. 31.

Cursor Mundi ; volume 31

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Europe, Northern--History.

Europe, Northern.

Europe--History--To 476.

Europe.

Europe--History--476-1492.

Northern Europe.

Knowledge, Theory of--Europe--History--To 1500.

Knowledge, Theory of.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

viii, 370 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Turnhout : Brepols, [2018]

Summary:

The North has long attracted attention, not simply as a circumpolar geographical location, but also as an ideological space, a place that is 'made' through the understanding, imagination, and interactions of both insiders and outsiders. The envisioning of the North brings it into being, and it is from this starting point that this volume explores how the North was perceived from ancient times up to the early modern period, questioning who, where, and what was defined as North over the course of two millennia. Covering historical periods as diverse as Ancient Greece to eighteenth-century France, and drawing on a variety of disciplines including cultural history, literary studies, art history, environmental history, and the history of science, the contributions gathered here combine to shed light on one key question: how was the North constructed as a place and a people? Material such as sagas, the ethnographic work of Olaus Magnus, religious writing, maps, medical texts, and illustrations are drawn on throughout the volume, offering important insights into how these key sources continued to be used over time.

Contents:

Envisioning North from a premodern perspective / Dolly Jørgensen and Virginia Langum

Scythia or Elysium? the land of the Hyperboreans in early Greek literature / Pär Sandin

Inter imperium sine fine: Thule and Hyperborea in Roman literature / Lewis Webb

The North in antiquity: between maps and myths / Mirela Avdagic

The making of Normandy as a Northmen land: mythological cultivation and coastal way-finding / Barbara Auger

The North in the Latin history writing of twelfth-century Norway / Steffen Hope

Cold characters: northern temperament in the modern imaginary / Virginia Langum

Northern seas, marine monsters, and the perceptions of the premodern North Atlantic in the Longue Durée / Vicki Szabo

Beastly belonging in the premodern North / Dolly Jørgensen

Making Sami of the Scots: Britain's and Scandinavia's near norths / Jeremy DeAngelo

The contours of the North? British mountains and northern peoples, 1600-1750 / Dawn Hollis

Unknown and barbarian: Scandinavia and the boundaries of civilization in early modern Spain / Mateo Ballester Rodríguez

Omne malum ab Aquilone: images of the evil north in early modern Italy and their impact on cross-religious encounters / Helena Wangefelt Ström and Federico Barbierato

Elevating the early modern North: the case of the Faroe Islands / Kim Simonsen

The Vagina nationum in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: envisioning the North as a repository of migrating barbarians / Stefan Donecker

The 'Northern Atlantis' revisited: inventing the Arctic roots of civilization in late eighteenth-century Paris / Päivi Maria Pihlaja.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

ISBN:

9782503574752

2503574750

OCLC:

1019660214