Discourses of Communion: Abbot William of Æbelholt and Saxo Grammaticus: Imagining the Christian Danish Community, Early Thirteenth Century

Summary

At the turn of the thirteenth century Denmark had grown into a powerful North European realm, which exerted substantial political influence on the Baltic Rim. During the crusades led by Valdemar I (r. 1157-1182) and his sons, considerable achievements in Slavic and Baltic territories transformed the kingdom into a great power striving to depict itself as standard-bearer of the Catholic Church in the North. Even though politically strong, Denmark had only recently been incorporated into the European christianitas, which meant that its written culture was embryonic compared to its southern counterparts such as The Holy Roman Empire and France. As Thomas Foerster claimed in the preceding chapter, the governing Danish elite were at the time in urgent need of portraying its kingdom as a prominent cultural power that not only had a glorious history of its own, but correspondingly had access to intellectuals who could convey that message. In consequence the newborn Baltic great power had to recruit skilled literati from overseas whose mission was to spread Christian written culture and to act on behalf of Danish kings in Latin communication with foreign princes. Simultaneously the leaders strived to create a stratum of prominent scribes by sending young aristocrats for educational training abroad.

This chapter focuses on two literati who shouldered these responsibilities in Denmark around the year 1200: William, an Augustinian canon from the abbey of St. Geneviève in Paris transferred to the abbey of Æbelholt, where he served as an abbot, and the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus. William was a member of an international monastic community, while Saxo was a secular clerk primarily associated with the Danish warrior-society. The purpose of this chapter is to elucidate how they imagined their communities in light of their distinct social and cultural backgrounds. In their capacities of literati they represented, to use Benedict Anderson's words, ‘tiny literate reefs on top of vast illiterate oceans’ and hence their literary efforts should be considered as important contributions to the making of the Christian Danish community.

Although William and Saxo belonged to different milieus, they imagined their communities in relation to the framework of ‘the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm’ which Anderson conceives as the predominant idea of societal order in Europe during the pre-modern era.