Tracking North: Art, Ecology, and Exchange in the Medieval Nordic World Robyn Angela Barrow

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Barrow, Robyn Angela, author.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania. History of Art., degree granting institution.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Art history.

European history.

Medieval history.

0377.

0335.

0581.

Local Subjects:

Art history.

European history.

Medieval history.

0377.

0335.

0581.

Physical Description:

1 electronic resource (528 pages)

Contained In:

Dissertations Abstracts International 86-12A

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, 2025

Language Note:

English

Summary:

By figuring the work of art as a contested resource within the context of medieval Scandinavia and the North Atlantic, Tracking North considers the ways in which objects mediated dynamics between local makers and expanding centralized power. The project situates agentive objects enmeshed in major questions about resource acquisition and use-liquid wealth, antler, timber, and arctic ivory-in their ecocultural contexts, demonstrating that art production in these northern materials enacted, and now illuminates, the complex advancement, negotiation, and repulsion of structures of authority in new territories in the Middle Ages.The first chapter explores hoards and the way that steady streams of revenue entering the island of Gotland propelled local infrastructure. The case study addresses traditional romantic preoccupations with the "Vikings" as a framing for medieval Scandinavian cultures, reading against the grain of this transience to investigate the ways that Gotlanders used the ongoing influx of gold and silver to generationally reinscribe their ownership of the land through the burial of hoarded wealth. Chapter two, an art history of antler in the European Middle Ages, explores the ways that antler particularly impacts and is impacted by the control and sovereignty of land through a deep investigation of an almost unique object, the Rijksmuseum carved moose antler. A third chapter argues that timber acquisition and works of art in wood enforced Norwegian political power on Commonwealth-era Iceland, mediating nuanced economic and cultural relationships. Anchored by the archeological walrus ivory crozier from Greenland's medieval cathedral, the final chapter on arctic ivory probes the Greenlandic walrus ivory trade, an early instance of Arctic resource exploitation. The project concludes with an epilogue, examining the 1671 Anointing ceremony of the monarch King Christian V of Denmark, a moment at which the cultural forces tracked in the case studies of the project cohere. Through the recruitment of objects in the absolutist ritual, the Anointing stages the contested resource into a pageant of dominance. Tracking North contextualizes this authoritarian impulse against local adaption and ingenuity in Nordic contexts, which unsettle the work of art and expose the inherent anxiety beneath all colonial regimes

Notes:

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 86-12, Section: A.

Advisors: Guerin, Sarah M. Committee members: Drpic, Ivan; Wicker, Nancy; Brisman, Shira

Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 2025

Local Notes:

School code: 0175

ISBN:

9798280762626

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license