Canon law rules of marriage became the legal means for policing forbidden sex in Iceland during the Middle Ages. These rules were adapted to various needs: enforcing morality, encouraging adherence to Christian sexual norms, and managing inheritance practices and property rights. This chapter explores sex in Iceland in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by focusing on legal regulation, the archbishops’ and bishops’ statutes, and selected court cases. In all the Nordic countries the regulation of sexuality was highly influenced by canon law, but a study of sex in Iceland needs to be understood in relation to the special character of the society. It was highly literate, because of Christianity, but decentralized, with no towns and a distant royal administration. There had never been a strong executive authority in Iceland, and its absence seems to have encouraged widespread interest in documenting personal disputes and property rights. This makes Iceland special. Written documents and historical writing were mostly kept at the farms of leading families, for use in disputes over property rights in the local courts. This differs from more urbanized societies elsewhere in Europe.

This chapter examines the countryside of late antique southern Gaul as a context for the development of popular culture at this time, making use of archaeological as well as literary evidence. It covers Provence, with a particular focus on the territorium of the city of Arles, although areas of western Languedoc are also considered due to the exceptional archaeological data available. Key themes and questions arising from recent scholarship are introduced to shape the discussion that follows before the landscape of the region is introduced. The inhabitants of the region are discussed next, in terms of their social and legal status, while the following section considers developments in settlement and social organisation, including the fate of the villa. A detailed look at livelihoods and patterns of productive activity follows. The final section looks at religious structures and landscapes, including the impact of the church in the late antique countryside.

This chapter deals with the processes of conversion and Christianization as they are explored in Old Norse literature, focusing on skaldic verse composed in Norway and Iceland in the tenth and eleventh centuries. It begins by discussing the poetry of Hallfreðr Óttarsson vandræðaskáld as a representation of a poet’s experience of conversion, through looking at the poems Hallfreðr composed for the pagan Norwegian ruler Hákon jarl and the Christianizing king Óláfr Tryggvason. It then considers the prominent role played by skaldic verse in the conversion of Iceland, in which skaldic poems gave voice both to pagan resistance and to Christian attacks on the pagan gods. Finally, the chapter discusses how poets in eleventh-century Norway were able to adapt their verse to reorient it away from its associations with paganism, allowing them to praise the Christian king Óláfr Haraldsson while preserving the cultural value their art form had traditionally possessed.

The Conclusion brings the works chapters into a synthetic discussion of what this book is designed to do: introduce On the Destruction of Jerusalem to contemporary scholarship and point to the ways in which it can enhance our knowledge of historiography, speech-writing, exemplarity, anti-Judaism, Classicism, biblical reception, and Greek-to-Latin literary adaptation in Christian late antiquity.

The circulation and republication of Christian Roman laws on Jews and Judaism gives us a window into the ways imperial attention to the Jewish “other” – sometimes benevolent, sometimes punitive – created multiple paths for the Christianization of the Roman Empire. Laws on economic status, social interaction, and religious custom ultimately produced a Jewish “religion” analogous to imperial Christianity.

Between the fourth and tenth centuries, across most of western Europe, law, legal institutions, and legal procedures became Christianized, in the sense that Christian rhetorical tropes, ideologies, and existential perspectives infused legal expression and practices. Royal and imperial courts were sites for interweaving secular and ecclesiastical authority, and hence for interweaving secular and ecclesiastical law. Such interweaving found voice in “mixed assemblies,” that is, assemblies in which both higher clergy and secular nobility participated in judicial and legislative processes; documents issued under the name of a king or emperor also show the integration of secular and ecclesiastical law. Law was not exclusively developed and implemented at royal courts and assemblies: complementing governmental efforts to instantiate Christian law, the educated elite took an interest in law, both as a subject for study and as a resource for informing arbitration, prosecution, or defense of rights and privileges. One of the many streams of legal formation was the practice of collecting, compiling, and conserving decrees and judicial opinions that would, in time, constitute the core of the canon law of subsequent centuries.

The purpose of the chapter is: first, to provide an overview of the socio-linguistic landscape of the late antique Mediterranean as a historical setting in which early Christian writers lived, worked, and developed their ideas on languages and religious identities; the linguistic and social practices they observed and experienced everyday set up an important context, even though their theoretical speculations may not directly reflect realities on the ground. Second, to briefly account for Christian encounters with foreign cultures and languages as the religion took off and to inquire into how the socio-linguistic situation in the ancient Mediterranean influenced the development of Christianity in its nascent stage and how Christianity in turn affected linguistic processes in the region. The spread of Christianity among various peoples and ethnic groups within and without the gradually disintegrating Roman empire was concurrent with complex formative processes within Christianity itself and took place amidst Trinitarian and Christological debates. The survey problematizes the role languages and linguistic distinctions played in these controversies and indicates several loci of potential tensions to be discussed further in the book (the alleged links between Punic speakers and Donatists, Germanic speakers and Arians, Syriac speakers and followers of non-Chalcedonian doctrines).

Chapter 1 begins with a historical account of the origins of the land of Rus, aimed at non-specialist readers. It describes the trading expeditions of the Viking Rus southwards—along the famed ‘Route from the Varangians to the Greeks’—and their eventual settlement in Kiev, a multi-ethnic and multilingual trading outpost on the banks of the Dnieper River. In the year 988, or thereabouts, Prince Vladimir of Kiev accepted baptism from the church in Constantinople, and over the next several decades a massive Byzantine-style liturgical infrastructure was erected in Kiev. The rest of the chapter considers the political motivations behind this decision, while drawing extensively on theoretical approaches developed by western medievalists. The princes in Kiev spent vast sums to instal a very real, very material imperial Roman technology throughout their realm. But what, exactly, was the purpose of this technology? What did the rites actually do that made the princes of Rus willing to invest and keep investing in them? I argue that the liturgical rites of the church were in fact powerful ideological tools, forms of mass propaganda, which gave rulers control over their subjects by giving them control over the sacred past.