Post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo.
Steffen Hope completed his PhD in history at the University of Southern Denmark in 2017. His thesis, “Constructing institutional identity through the cult of royal saints, c.1050-c.1200” examined the cults of SS Edmund of East Anglia, Olaf of Norway, and Knud Rex of Denmark, and investigated how these saints were formulated in texts produced at their respective cult centres.
Following his PhD, Hope has worked on fragments of medieval liturgical manuscripts at the University Library of Southern Denmark as part of a pilot project co-financed by the Centre for Medieval Literature. He has also worked as a university lecturer at Linnaeus University in Sweden, and as a research assistant at the project Mapping Lived Religion at Linnaeus, in which he focussed on fragments of medieval calendars.
His main research interests are the cult of saints, identity-construction, history-writing, and manuscript fragments. Hope has published extensively on these topics.
As a member of the ELITES team, Hope focusses on expressions and strategies of episcopal legitimisation of power in medieval Norway.