Download PDF | Juhan Kreem, Juhan Kreem, Gerhard Jaritz - The Edges of the Medieval World - (2009).
152 Pages
PREFACE
In his literary oeuvre, the Chilean writer Luis Sepúlveda (b. 1949) has concentrated on ecological topics. In 1989, he wrote Mundo del fin del Mundo dealing with the killing of whales in the seas off Patagonia and actions initiated against it.1 This novel shows very well that the ends of the world need not only be something far away and therefore irrelevant for a society living in the “centre” but may also have to be seen as particularly important, and thereby near, in a number of respects touching all of humankind. In our days the same is particularly true about remote areas of the world confronted with problems of climatic change and global warming.
During our first discussions about organising a meeting on medieval “worlds at the end of the world” we soon became aware of the fact that, as is true today, the edges of the world should be seen as a phenomenon that was regularly relevant for many members of society as a whole. Moreover, often they also have to be considered in different, context-dependent, ways. For some people, they may have been understood as the areas situated at the actual fringes of the globe, for others, however, they may have been the regions outside one’s own living space, that is, territory, town, village, or even house. Borders, limits, frontiers, and peripheries are recurring subjects in the historical disciplines, particularly in medieval studies.
Not limited to the most direct geographic sense, such edges can also be found elsewhere, for instance, in the social, cultural, mental, and spiritual spheres. That also means that dealing with various medieval edges of the world may concern rather dissimilar questions to be raised and different source evidence to be analysed. The application of contextualising and comparative approaches is necessary.
This volume is the outcome of an international workshop of specialists in different fields of the historical disciplines from eight European countries. In context with its topic, the meeting was held in the village of Koguva on Muhu, the third-largest island in Estonia, a place that also represents a position on the fringes of the European Union of today. The atmosphere of the island and the village influenced the discussions and re-sults of the meeting to a special extent. For the participants of the workshop this atmosphere became the “spirit of Muhu,” which formed the basis of an exceptionally fruitful scholarly discourse. In her opening contribution, Felicitas Schmieder concentrates on the spatial and temporal aspects of the topic. She deals with medieval ideas about connecting the geographical edges of the world with finis saeculi, that is, the final events of world history.
These connections were discussed mainly from the twelfth century onwards and were represented on world maps in particular. Gerhard Jaritz analyses the geographical edges of the world and the creatures living there as a construction by the society of the centre, to be seen, on the one hand, as a kind of counter-image to one’s own world. On the other hand, he also shows the proximity and relation of phenomena ascribed to the fringes and a number of, often wondrous, occurrences in one’s own society. A continuous connection was made in the textual and visual representations of far-off peripheries and the centre, that is, between familiar space and the edges of the world.
Else Mundal discovered from the analysis of Norse sources that the Vikings’ search for far-away lands and their journeys into the unknown cannot be seen in the context of any fear that they would sail over the edge. Torstein Jørgensen examines the theological perspectives of Adam of Bremen’s eleventh-century description of the land of the Norwegians as “the last in the world” and the “exceedingly fierce race of the Danes, of the Norwegians, or of the Swedes.”
Anti Selart’s contribution concentrates on the late medieval political situation at some specific edges of Christianity. He is particularly interested in the rhetoric applied to describe or create Livonia’s fifteenth-century enemies and he explains it as a part of self-imagination, which in turn encountered similar competing self-imaginations. Juhan Kreem analyses the role of pirates in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Livonia. He deals with the insecurity of their life, one of the crucial characteristics of life on the edge.
Tom Pettitt approaches the topic from the general aspect of the functional significance of edges and boundaries reflected in any cultural activities. He analyses this phenomenon with the help of medieval and traditional narrative and finds the powerful symbolic potential of the “Darkness at the Edge of Town” (Bruce Springsteen) or of the “the life at the Flurgrenze,” that is, the boundary itself. Judith Sebő looks for such boundaries in one’s own small world, the outskirts of towns in late medieval and early modern visual representations. Commerce, royal gift-exchange, and aristocratic identity play the most relevant roles in Aleksander Pluskowski’s contribution on the geographic sources, import, markets, and the functions of exotic animals and animal products in medieval Europe. He shows that “exotic animals could be ‘broken down’ into a set of components – conceptually and physically – emphasising different meanings.”
At the workshop, the “beast of Muhu,” a New Year’s Goat (näärisokk) kept at the Muhu Museum in the village of Koguva, provided a kind of connection between the peripheries of the medieval world and the edges of modern culture. Constructed in 1950, it represents a house-visit custom during the first days of the New Year. Tom Pettitt and Kadri Tüür are conscious that one can no longer take for granted the survival of medieval and pre-medieval practices in modern folk traditions. With regard to such winter-visit customs, they are, however, able to suggest some continuity between the late medieval and modern periods. In the final paper of the volume, Lucie Doležalová deals with silence as the edge of language, when words are not enough and unable to express properly what the speaker had in mind. She shows that the notion of the limitations of language in the Middle Ages was particularly well developed in the context of the impossibility of grasping the nature of God.
We would like to thank all the participants of the workshop and the authors of this volume for their motivation and contributions. We are also grateful to the Muhu Museum, the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Tallinn, and the Department of Medieval Studies at Central European University (Budapest) for their support and their interest in the workshop and this publication. The “spirit of Muhu” led to the idea of continuing the discussion on edges, boundaries, and margins in the medieval world and society in regular discussions of specialists and publishing them in a series, The Muhu Proceedings, of which this book is the first volume. Gerhard Jaritz and Juhan Kreem Budapest and Tallinn, January 2009
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