Risk Societies on the Frontier: Missionary Emotional Communities in the Southern Baltic, Eleventh – Thirteenth Centuries

Summary

In what sense can we consider missionary communities exploring and evangelizing various areas of the Baltic Rim in the high Middle Ages as imagined? Although the category of missionary was not emic, it cannot be denied that many missionaries did perceive themselves as a special class of the Church's representatives. Their number, geographical dispersion, and centuries-long activity also exceeded any prospect of a face-to-face self-apprehension. Furthermore, as agents working on the forefront of the northern European christianitas, missionaries proffered a very specific, both practical and ideological comprehension of their own and the Christian community's limits and questions of belonging and otherness. Finally, by often being confronted with similar types of challenges and threats they seem to have become a community of experience as well as common history and can thus be considered a community of fate united by feelings of togetherness and brotherhood to some extent.

Such a rudimentary description obviously overlooks many local differences, characteristics of particular missionary authors, and many individual turns taken by the historical expansion of Christianization. A possible way to retain these differences and discrete features while giving analytical coherence to the imagined missionary community is to pay attention to its socially significant passions. That is, those passions that both mediated the community's relationship with pagans and the outside world, to a large extent regulated the inner group relationship in concrete monasteries or episcopal palaces and the Christianization movement writ large. Two such crucial social passions were the missionary sense of risk and danger as well as the accompanying fear.

This chapter will thus treat high medieval missionaries operating on the Baltic frontier as a Risikogesellschaft of sorts, constituted by the self-consciousness of dangers and risks it was exposed to. Risk society – a term coined by the late Ulrich Beck to describe the discontents of late modernity – is the manner in which (modern) society organizes in response to risk and implies heightened preoccupation with the questions of future, unpredictability, and safety. These aspects were particularly acute for the societies existing on the frontiers of medieval Christendom, entangled in a cultural haze of known and unknown, possibilities and dangers – among which the Baltic missionaries represent a frontier society par excellence.