Medieval Frontiers: Cross-Cultural Encounters in Premodern Europe and Beyond
Medeltida gränsland: tvärkulturella möten i det förmoderna Europa och dess omvärld
About the Reading list
Primary Sources
Adam of Bremen: History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, transl. Francis J. Tschan: https://archive.org/details/historyofarchbis00adam_0/page/n5/mode/2up
Alcuin, The Life of Willibrord, c.796, tr. Thomas Head, in Soldiers of Christ https://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/basis/Alcuin-willbrord.asp
The Crusades: A Reader, ed. by S.J. Allen, Emilie Amt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014) [On Canvas]
Helmold of Bosau, The Chronicle of the Slavs, tr. Francis J. Tschan (New York: Octagon Books, 1966) [On Canvas]
Henry of Livonia, The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, trans. by James A. Brundage (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003) [CANVAS]
Ibn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness, trans. by Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone (New York: Penguin, 2012) [LIBRARY / CANVAS]
The Livonian Rhymed Chronicle, trans. by Jerry C. Smith and William L. Urban (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977) [ONLINE]: https://prussia.online/Data/Book/th/the-livonian-rhymed-chronicle/The%20Livonian%20Rhymed%20Chronicle%20(1977),%20OCR.pdf
Muslim and Christian Contact in the Middle Ages: A Reader, ed. by Jarbel Rodriguez (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015) [On Canvas]
Nicolaus von Jeroschin, The Chronicle of Prussia by Nicolaus von Jeroschin: A History of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia, 1190–1331, trans. by Mary Fischer (London: Routledge, 2016) [ONLINE]: https://prussia.online/Data/Book/th/the-chronicle-of-prussia/Jeroschin%20N.%20The%20Chronicle%20of%20Prussia%20(2016),%20OCR.pdf
Rimbert, Life of Anskar, the Apostle of the North, 801–865, tr. by Charles H. Robinson: https://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/basis/anskar.asp
Robinson, Charles H., trans., The Life of Otto Apostle of Pomerania 1060–1139 by Ebo and Herbordus (New York: MacMillan, 1920)
Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum/The Deeds of the Danes, vol. 1-2, tr. Peter Fisher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)
Snorri Sturluson, Edda, tr. Anthony Faulkes (London: Everyman, 1987) [ONLINE]: http://vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/EDDArestr.pdf
Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla. Volume I, tr. Anthony Faulkes, Alison Finlay (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, University College London, 2011)
Thietmar of Merseburg/David Warner, Ottonian Germany: The Chronicle of Thietmar of Merseburg (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001) [On Canvas]
Secondary Literature
Abulafia, David, ‘Introduction: Seven Types of Ambiguity, c. 1100–1500’, in Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices, ed. by Nora Berend and David Abulafia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 1–34
Abulafia, David, and Nora Berend, eds, Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices (Farnham: Ashgate, 2002)
Adams, Jonathan, and Cordelia Heß, ‘Encounters and Fantasies: Muslims, Jews and Christians in the North’, in Fear and Loathing in the North: Jews and Muslims in Medieval Scandinavia and the Baltic Region, ed. by Cordelia Heß and Jonathan Adams (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), pp. 3–28
Bartlett, Robert, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)
Berend, Nora, ‘Frontiers’, in Palgrave Advances in the Crusades, ed. by Helen J. Nicholson (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 148–71
Burns, Robert I., ‘The Significance of the Frontier in the Middle Ages’, in Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. by Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 307–30
Cassidy-Welch, Megan, ‘Space and Place in Medieval Contexts’, Parergon, 27 (2010), pp. 1-12
de Coca Castañer, José Enrique López, ‘Institutions on the Castilian-Granadan Frontier’, in Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. by Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 127-150
Garrison, Mary, ‘The Study of Emotions in Early Medieval History: Some Starting Points’, Early Medieval Europe, 10 (2001), 243–50
Ghosh, Sami, ‘Conquest, Conversion, and Heathen Customs in Henry of Livonia’s Chronicon Livoniae and the Livländische Reimchronik’, Crusades, 11 (2012), 87–108
Giesen, Bernhard, ‘Inbetweenness and Ambivalence’, in The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology, ed. by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ronald N. Jacobs, and Philip Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 788–804
Gowers, Bernard, ‘Creolization and Medieval Latin Europe’, Medieval Worlds, 16 (2022), pp. 263–83
Grzybowski, Lukas G., The Christianization of Scandinavia in the Viking Era. Religious Change in Adam of Bremen's Historical Work (Leeds: ARC Humanities Press, 2023), pp. ix – xx
Heebøll-Holm, Thomas K., ”Between Pagan Pirates and Glorius Sea-Warrior: The Portrayal of the Viking Pirate in Danish Twelfth-Century Lation Historiography”, Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, 8 (2012), 141-170
Hoel, Nikolas O., 'Moving the North: Rimbert, the Vita Anskarii, and the Cynocephali', Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, 17 (2021), pp. 101-134
Janson, Henrik, ‘Making Enemies: Aspects on the Formation of Conflicting Identities in the Southern Baltics around the Year 1000’, in Medieval History Writing and Crusading Ideology, ed. by Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen and Kurt Villads Jensen (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2005), pp. 141–54
Jensen, Carsten Selch, ‘How to Convert a Landscape: Henry of Livonia and the Chronicon Livoniae’, in The Clash of Cultures on the Medieval Baltic Frontier, ed. by Alan V. Murray (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 151–68
Jensen, Kurt Villads, ‘The Blue Baltic Border of Denmark in the High Middle Ages: Danes, Wends and Saxo Grammaticus’, in Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices, ed. by Nora Berend and David Abulafia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 173–93
Jensen, Kurt Villads, ‘Holy War — Holy Wrath! Baltic Wars Between Regulated Warfare and Total Annihilation Around 1200’, in Church and Belief in the Middle Ages: Popes, Saints, and Crusaders, ed. by Kirsi Salonen and Sari Katajala-Peltomaa (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), pp. 227–50
Kaljundi, Linda, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians: Reconstruction of Otherness in the Saxon Missionary and Crusading Chronicles, 11th–13th Centuries’, The Medieval Chronicle, 5 (2008), 113–27
Kļaviņš, Kaspars, ‘The Ideology of Christianity and Pagan Practice among the Teutonic Knights: The Case of the Baltic Region’, Journal of Baltic Studies, 37 (2006), pp. 260-276
Kedar, Benjamin Z., Cultures of the Medieval Kingdom of Jerusalem: Frontier Inventiveness in the Age of the Crusades (New York: Cornell University Press, 2025)
Lindow, John, Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs (Oxford: Oxfrod University Press, 2001)
Mažeika, Rasa, ‘Granting Power to Enemy Gods in the Chronicles of the Baltic Crusades’, in Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices, ed. by Nora Berend and David Abulafia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 153–71
Menache, Sophia, ‘Love of God or Hatred of Your Enemy? The Emotional Voices of the Crusades’, Mirabilia, 10 (2010), 1–10
Montgomery, James E., 'Ibn Fadlan and the Rûsiyyah', Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, 3 (2000), pp. 1-25
Murray, Alan V., ‘Heathens, Devils and Saracens: Crusader Concepts of the Pagan Enemy during the Baltic Crusades (Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries)’, in Crusading on the Edge: Ideas and Practice of Crusading in Iberia and the Baltic Region, 1100–1500, ed. by Torben K. Nielsen and Iben Fonnesberg-Schmidt (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 199–223
Nielsen, Torben K., ‘Mission and Submission: Societal Change in the Baltic in the Thirteenth Century’, in Medieval History Writing and Crusading Ideology, ed. by Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen and Kurt Villads Jensen (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2005), pp. 216–31
Nielsen, Torben K., ‘Henry of Livonia on Woods and Wilderness’, in Crusade and Chronicle Writing on the Medieval Baltic Frontier. A Companion to the Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, ed by. Marek Tamm, Linda Kaljundi, Carsten Selch Jensen (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 157-78
Nielsen, Torben K., ‘The Making of New Cultural Landscapes in the Medieval Baltic’, in Medieval Christianity in the North: New Studies, ed. by Kirsi Salonen, Kurt Villads Jensen, and Torstein Jørgensen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 121–53
Palmer, James T., ‘Rimbert’s Vita Anskarii and Scandinavian Mission in the Ninth Century’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 55 (2004), pp. 235-256
Perron, Anthony, ‘The Face of the “Pagan”: Portraits of Religious Deviance on the Medieval Periphery’, The Journal of The Historical Society, 9 (2009), 467–92
Pluskowski, Aleks, Black Cross: A History of the Baltic Crusades (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026)
Rosenwein, Barbara H., ‘Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions’, Passions in Context: Journal for the History and Theory of Emotions, 1 (2010), 1–32: https://alioshabielenberg.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Rosenwein-2010-Problems-and-Methods-in-the-History-of-Emotions.pdf
Rosik, Stanisław, ‘Triglav and the “God of the Germans” in Szczecin in the 1120s: From Studies of the Religion of the Slavs and Its Christian Interpretation in the Middle Ages (An Example of Otto of Bamberg’s Hagiography)’, Quaestiones Medii Aevi Novae, 25 (2020), pp. 47-77: https://qman.com.pl/wrzutki/2022/11/QMAN_25_2020.pdf
Sverrir Jakobsson, ‘Space’, in The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Sagas, ed. by Sverrir Jakobsson, Armann Jakobsson (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 175-186.
Šnē, Andris, ‘The Image of the Other or the Own: Representations of Local Societies in Heinrici Chronicon’, The Medieval Chronicle, 6 (2009), pp. 247–60
Turner, Frederick Jackson, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ (1893) (excerpts): https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/gilded/empire/text1/turner.pdf
Urban, William L. ‘Victims of the Baltic Crusade’, Journal of Baltic Studies, 29 (1998), pp. 195-212
Wang, Solveig Marie, ‘Saami Conversion and Identity Negotiation in the Medieval Period’, in Colonial Entanglements and the Medieval Nordic World. Norse Colonies and Indigenous Peoples, ed. by Cordelia Hess, Solveig Marie Wang, Erik Wolf (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2025), pp. 109-135
Wood, Ian N., ‘Where the Wild Things Are’, in Visions of Community in the Post-Roman World: The West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, 300–1100, ed. by Walter Pohl, Clemens Gantner, and Richard Payne (Ashgate: Farnham, 2012), pp. 531–42