Languages of Power and Legitimacy on the Periphery: Poland and Norway, 1000-1300

Special issue: Acta Poloniae Historica, vol. 129 (2024), Languages of Power and Legitimacy on the Periphery: Poland and Norway, 1000-1300

Link: Volume 129 (aph-ihpan.edu.pl)

This multidisciplinary special issue investigates symbolic languages employed by religious and political elites in two peripheral polities, Poland and Norway, 1000-1300, with a particular focus on the politically legitimizing role and competitive use of such means. Scholarship on medieval peripheral elites, such as these from Scandinavia or East-Central Europe, has traditionally been investigated through the diffusionist paradigm of Europeanization (R. Bartlett), which focused on their relationship with the political and cultural centers (Western Europe, papacy, Byzantium etc.), passive adaptation to political culture, patterns of acculturation and integration, etc. Within their respective, nationally framed historiographies, the two polities during this period have been traditionally considered from the teleological perspective of centralistic and hierarchy-inducing state-building processes. In this issue, however, we turn the focus to the competitive symbolic languages of (self-)legitimization employed by these peripheral elites in the context of two polities, whose elements of order remained in flux or could be ranked in different, often shifting, and sometimes conflicting ways. By considering this problem through a comparative Norwegian and Polish case-studies this special issue studies the conditions and practical means of formation of elites and competition within them in two distinct polities facing similar challenges.

 

Table of contents 

Introduction: Languages of Power and Elite Legitimization on the Periphery, Poland and Norway, 1000–1300
Wojtek Jezierski, Hans Jacob Orning, Grzegorz Pac

Trimming the Tangle of Legend: Heroic Haircuts, Materializing Meals, and the Legitimization of Dynastic Succession in Norwegian and Polish Foundation Narratives
Rafał Rutkowski, Ben Allport

Making Christian Rulership on the Peripheries of the Latin World
Zbigniew Dalewski, Hans Jacob Orning

Feasting and Elite Legitimization in Poland and Norway: Propaganda, Political Economy, and Recognition in a Comparative Perspective, 1000-1300
Wojtek Jezierski, Paweł Żmudzki

Holy Bishops, Papal Canonization and the Legitimization of Power in Thirteenth-Century Norway and Poland: The Cases of Eystein Erlendsson of Nidaros and Stanislaus of Kraków
Stefen Hope, Grzegorz Pac

Concluding Remarks about Languages of Power and Elite Legitimization in Poland and Norway, 1000–1300
Nora Berend