Denmark and Europe in the Middle Ages, c.1000–1525

Essays in Honour of Professor Michael H. Gelting

Kerstin Hundahl, Lars Kjær, Niels Lund, Kerstin Hundahl, Lars Kjær, Niels Lund

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317152736
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Where medieval Denmark and Scandinavia as a whole has often been seen as a cultural backwater that passively and belatedly received cultural and political impulses from Western Europe, Professor Michael H. Gelting and scholars inspired by him have shown that the intellectual, religious and political elite of Denmark actively participated in the renaissance and reformation of the central and later medieval period. This work has wide ramifications for understanding developments in medieval Europe, but so far the discussion has taken place only in Danish-language publications. This anthology brings the latest research in Danish medieval history to a wider audience and integrates it with contemporary international discussions of the making of the European middle ages.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Kerstin Hundahl and Lars Kjær

Michael H. Gelting has been one of the most influential historians working on medieval Denmark in his generation. On 24 September 2011, a large number of Scandinavian and British scholars gathered in the National Archives of Denmark in Copenhagen for a symposium in honour of Gelting, organised on behalf of the National Archives and The Medieval Circle at Copenhagen University on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. The essays in this anthology were developed from several of the talks from the day as well as a number of other contributions.

Michael H. Gelting is Archivist and Senior Researcher at the Reference and Outreach Department of the Danish National Archives, and External Professor of Early Scandinavian Studies and Chair in Scandinavian Studies at Aberdeen University. Gelting’s career and research both as an archivist and a medievalist has been marked by a wide-ranging scope and an innovative approach to difficult subject matters. He has an abiding interest in the effects of the Black Death, especially in the region of Maurienne in the Savoy, but has also made important contributions to the study of Danish medieval society, focusing on legal history, translations, the Danish church, kinship and European feudalism.

Many of the students, colleagues and medievalists who have had the pleasure to get to know Michael Gelting know of his friendly and sociable nature. He is always willing to help discuss an undergraduate student’s paper, take a look at a Latin translation, discuss more complicated issues, edit/correct articles or step up at the last minute if a speaker has been needed to give a paper. When Gelting, together with some of his students, in 1997 formed The Medieval Circle of Copenhagen, he could not have known that this would result in a symposium in 2011 and an anthology in his honour. The overwhelming response from his former students and colleagues to participate shows the importance Michael Gelting has had to medieval scholars not just in Copenhagen, or Denmark but also all over Northern Europe. Besides attending the meetings of ‘The Circle’ as frequently as his two jobs allow, he also takes the train across the sound to Sweden to partake both as speaker and listener at Lund’s Medieval Academy (ALMA). Intermingling and participation with other students and faculties at universities outside of Denmark is greatly encouraged by Gelting, who not only invites scholars to come to Aberdeen, but also encourages his own students to travel frequently from Aberdeen to Copenhagen to participate in the meetings of the ‘Circle’. These circle meetings are most giving to the young scholar fortunate enough to sit next to Gelting on a Monday evening, drinking whisky with him until the wee hours of 2 o’clock, when, to one’s great reluctance, the barkeep closes shop. Many of us have, after a talk with Michael, gone back to work the next day with renewed energy and a slight headache, knowing that with his guidance our research was on the right track.

Denmark and Europe

As Ebbe Nyborg remarked in the portrait he presented at the symposium, Gelting’s first-hand acquaintance with the French material, his linguistic skills and familiarity with current European scholarship has enabled him to play an important role in changing the way historians have approached medieval Denmark in recent decades.

Until the 1990s, it had been widely accepted that there were essential differences between the societies of Western Europe on the one hand and Denmark and the Scandinavian countries on the other. Gelting has drawn attention to the central importance of the work of Kr. Erslev (1852–1930), the father of modern Danish historical scholarship, in cementing this perception. According to Erslev, Danish history (like that of Anglo-Saxon England) showed how ‘a Germanic society (Statsordning) developed, independent of Frankish feudalism’.¹ The foundation of this society was the oath that bound free farmers to their ruler, not the contracts and fiefs which was then seen as central to the feudal system. While much of Erslev’s vision of Danish society was discarded and challenged in the ensuing century of debate, the central idea, that the history of Denmark in the Central Middle Ages was ‘an autochthonous phenomenon, the story of a special Danish (or Nordic) society’s transformation under the influence of two imported, European institutions: the Monarchy and the Church’ remained influential.²

In an article from 1999, ‘Det komparative perspektiv i dansk højmiddelalderforskning’ (‘the comparative perspective in the study of the Danish Central Middle Ages’), Gelting offered a very influential critique of the idea that medieval Denmark was radically different from its European neighbours and needed to be studied in isolation.³ In Denmark, as in the rest of Europe, society was dominated by aristocratic landowners who lived off the work of the peasantry, here too the elite was divided between Christian clergy and a military aristocracy. Crucially, this elite was just as directly exposed to new ideas in religious life, intellectual debates about political organisation and chivalric culture as their Western European counterparts.⁴ Essential in allowing Gelting to make these comparisons was his awareness that the international understanding of medieval society had changed radically in the second half of the twentieth century. Unlike in Erslev’s time, ‘the Northern French political feudal structure is no longer seen as a kind of absolute model for depictions of Europe’s political structure in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but as one among countless variations’ on a shared political and socio-economic form.⁵ This new appreciation of the variations in Europe’s medieval experience made it possible to see Denmark not as fundamentally alien, but as yet another variation of a common European theme. This made it methodologically feasible to place the developments in Denmark in a comparative perspective and to draw parallels and contrasts to the development in other European polities, which might help compensate for the inadequacies of the meagre, surviving Danish sources.

Gelting went on to discuss how such a comparative perspective should be handled and his suggestions here are central to the way the chapters in this volume approach Denmark and Europe in the middle ages. In the traditional vision of Denmark as an essentially non-European society that slowly succumbed to the influence of alien, European institutions, it was often assumed that medieval Denmark underwent the same developmental phases as Western Europe (read France), although with a couple of centuries’ delay. The strong Valdemarian kingship, conventionally dated to the period between Valdemar I’s accession in 1157 and the death of Valdemar II in 1241, was seen as comparable to that of the Carolingian emperors, while the dissolution of the monarchy that followed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was believed to be similar to the ‘feudal’ fragmentation that had taken place in France around the year 1000.⁶ As Gelting emphasised, however, twelfth-century Denmark had a strong international orientation: the children of the Danish elite frequented the great universities of France and Italy, and Valdemar I employed the English clerk, Radulf, to organise a modern, royal chancellery.⁷ More recently, Gelting has pointed out that the middle and second half of the twelfth century, the period in which Denmark’s ‘Europeanisation’ is supposed to have taken place, is the same period in which ideas such as chivalry and a developed feudal terminology is now believed to have developed.⁸ Denmark did not experience ‘a late and incomplete adaptation of an already existing, European culture, but participated in a development that took place at the same time across Europe’.⁹ There were considerable and important variations between different regions in Europe, not least Denmark, but these were not the results of an ‘“incomplete” adaptation of a diffuse cultural influence’ but the result of conscious choices made by rulers and a native elite that was intimately aware of developments in contemporary Europe.¹⁰

A cursory look at the last decade of research on medieval Denmark shows how dramatically this comparative perspective has triumphed. Legal, political and religious culture in Denmark is now studied as part of a greater European whole. Just as in the Reich after Gerd Althoff, political life in Denmark is now seen as dominated by ‘family, friends and followers’ rather than the administrative apparatus of the medieval ‘state’, a change of direction pioneered by Gelting.¹¹ Former students of Gelting, such as Mia Münster-Swendsen and Thomas Kristian Heebøll-Holm, have shown the influence of ideals of courtesy and chivalry in the Danish elite.¹² The change of direction is perhaps most clearly seen in the comparative and European orientation of the last decade’s large-scale Danish research projects. The series of Carlsberg Academy Conferences on Medieval Legal History have asked the question ‘How Nordic are the Medieval Nordic Laws?’ And generally, the conclusion of recent research seems to have been that the law codes of medieval Denmark were the result of new legislation inspired by contemporary European developments in legal thought, rather than the writing down of ancient customs, as had often been assumed in earlier scholarship.¹³ At Syddansk Universitet, the research project, ‘Denmark and the Crusading Movement’, demonstrated the influence of the international call for the deliverance of Jerusalem in the kingdom of Denmark.¹⁴ Currently, at the University of Copenhagen, the project ‘Danish Historical writing before 1225 and its Intellectual Context in Medieval Europe’ seeks to revitalise research in the historical literature of medieval Denmark by placing it in the context of the wider renaissance of historical writing in twelfth-century Europe.

A central line in Gelting’s attack on the isolationist tendency has been that scholars from the countries that then constituted the periphery of Western Europe should not restrict themselves to studying the local adaptation of Western European cultural norms, but should actively participate in the international debate about the character of medieval societies. A challenge that requires Danish medievalists not just to use work on medieval Europe to throw new light on questions relating to Danish history, but to work on and familiarise themselves with the European sources.

The essays offered here in honour of Gelting illustrate how much the study of the Middle Ages has been transformed over the last decades in Denmark. They are divided into four sections, reflecting some of the central themes of Gelting’s research: intellectual and religious culture, not least the history of the Danish Church; legal history, in particular the developments of the regional law codes in medieval Denmark, and political and aristocratic culture.

The first section is concerned with religious culture in Denmark and Europe. Kim Esmark explores donations to the Cistercian abbey of Esrum, from 1150 to 1250, and the conflicts that developed around these. As Esmark demonstrates, the material from Esrum shows remarkable similarities with similar monastic foundations in France. Through comparisons with these it is possible to offer a detailed portrait of the social relationships surrounding monasteries in medieval Denmark. In his chapter Ebbe Nyborg explores the introduction of Byzantine motifes, showing Christ suffering on the cross, into Denmark in the twelfth century. Most of the crucifixes found in Denmark, however, are hybrids, with elements of Christ as eternal ruler and suffering human being intermingled. Nyborg explores how these images might have been intended to satisfy both the current, European-wide fascination with the humanity of Christ and traditional Nordic concerns about dignity and stoicism. Agnes Arnórsdóttir continues the investigation of how religious ideas and images were adapted in a Scandinavian context. Her chapter shows that the cult of the Virgin Mary in Iceland was not merely a pale reflection of European ideas, but a vibrant and dynamic force that influenced both the theory and practice of motherhood on the very edge of Europe. Johnny Grandjean Gøgsig Jakobsen explores how the Dominicans of Denmark and the other Nordic countries responded to the continent-wide catastrophe of the Black Death, charting the spread of rumours associating the Black Friars with the plague from the Pyrenees to Gotland.

The second section investigates intellectual culture in medieval Denmark and its European connections. Steffen Harpsøe investigates a recently discovered manuscript fragment from the mid-eleventh or early-twelfth century, containing a reference to the Flemish St Aldegunde. The fragment turns out to offer tantalising hints about international contacts at the very beginning of the period in which Denmark began to adopt aspects of Western European culture. Mia Münster-Swendsen continues the exploration of the intellectual networks of the Danish elite. Her chapter analyses the intriguing case of how Archbishop Eskil of Lund came to lose a large amount of money, which he had deposited at the Abbey of St Victor in Paris, and the international scandal that followed. The case offers a fascinating insight into the functioning of political and intellectual networks of friends and reveals just how deeply entwined the twelfth-century Danish elite was in the wider Western European world. Niels Houlberg Hansen explores the ways in which this interaction changed Denmark. His chapter explores the rapid development of the Danish language in the central medieval period, in which Danish parted ways with the other Scandinavian languages, and argues that this development must be seen in relation to the still more intensive contact between Danes and their European neighbours. Carsten Jahnke continues the investigation of encounters between the Danish elite and Western Europe into the later middle ages. His article explores two journeys by King Christian I and Queen Dorothea to Rome in 1475 and 1476, respectively. Amongst the outcomes of these two very different journeys were not least the papal licence for the foundation of the University of Copenhagen.

In the third section, focus is directed at legal culture and customs in medieval Denmark. Bertil Nilsson’s investigation of the Church Law of Scania demonstrates how well Denmark had been integrated into the European Church community by the twelfth century. The Danish chur...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• Part I: Religious Culture
• Part II: Intellectual Culture
• Part III: Legal Culture
• Part IV: Aristocratic and Court Culture
• Index