Reimagining Christendom

Writing Iceland's Bishops into the Roman Church, 1200-1350

Joel D. Anderson

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9781512822816
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

With its expanding legal system and its burgeoning throngs of lawyers, legates, and documents, the papacy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries has often been credited with spearheading a governmental revolution that molded the high medieval church into an increasingly disciplined, uniform, and machine-like institution. Reimagining Christendom offers a fresh appraisal of these developments from a surprising and distinctive vantage point. Tracing the web of textual ties that connected the northern fringes of Europe to the Roman see, Joel D. Anderson explores the ways in which Norse writers recruited, refashioned, and repurposed the legal principles and official documents of the Roman church for their own ends.Drawing on little-known vernacular sagas, Reimagining Christendom is populated with tales of married bishops, fictitious and forged papal bulls, and imagined canon law proceedings. These narratives, Anderson argues, demonstrate how Norse writers adapted and reconfigured the institutional power of the church in order to legitimize some of the thoroughly abnormal practices of their native bishops. In the process, Icelandic clerics constructed their own visions of ecclesiastical order—visions that underscore the thoroughly malleable character of the Roman church's text-based government and that articulate diverse ways of belonging to the far-flung imagined community of high medieval Christendom.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Maps
• Introduction. Ecclesiastical Predicaments at the Edge of the World
• Chapter 1. Envisioning the Roman Church in the Age of Innocent III, Páll Jónsson, and Sverrir Sigurðarson
• Chapter 2. Irregular Sanctity at the Limits of Ecclesiastical Law
• Chapter 3. Bishop Guðmundr’s Hail Mary: Imagining and Suspending Papal Government in Medieval Iceland
• Chapter 4. Choreographing the Crusades in the Archbishopric of Niðaróss
• Chapter 5. The Powers and Perils of Documents in the Life of Bishop Lárentíus Kálfsson
• Conclusion. Imagining Iceland’s Place
• Appendix 1. The Bishops of Iceland to c. 1350
• Appendix 2. Bishops’ Sagas Discussed in This Book
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments