Food Culture in Medieval Scandinavia

The making, eating, and sharing of food throughout society represents an important and exciting area of study with the potential to advance the field of scholarship, particularly in the context of Scandinavian Studies. This book analyses the historical, legal, and literary sources of the region during the medieval period to explore different aspects of Scandinavian culture relating to food and drink: production, consumption (including feasts), trading (distribution), and the associated social rituals. Using new and innovative approaches, this collection of studies offers broad insights into a great variety of social practices and includes fresh information on not only social history but also traditional topics such as trade, commercial exchange, legal regulation, and political organisation. The book unites contributors from a variety of backgrounds, further enriching the content of a collection that promises to make a significant contribution to the state of current research.

Viktória Gyönki is a historian, museologist and PhD candidate at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Her research interests are connected to medieval Scandinavia, with a special interest on Icelandic and Norwegian legal sources connected to outlawry and conflict solving. Andrea Maraschi has a PhD in Medieval History (University of Bologna), and has been a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Iceland and at the University of Bari. He teaches Anthropology of Food at the University of Bologna. His research interests touch, among other things, the history of food, the history of magic, and the history of medicine. Karoline Kjesrud is Associate Professor in medieval art at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. She works closely with the medieval collection and her research encompasses humans’ relations to religion, spirituality, and nature throughout history. Kjesrud is dedicated to highlighting historical perspectives for understanding the present and pointing out directions for the future. Stefan Figenschow is a medieval historian at UiT the Arctic University of Norway. His main research interests are comparative approaches to the expansion of medieval Scandinavian central authority to the north and east, comparing the actions of the Scandinavian realms to each other and with the more general European tendencies of the period. Marion Poilvez is a PhD candidate at the University of Iceland (Háskóli Íslands) and researches outlaws, outlawry, and the dynamics of exclusion in the Icelandic sagas. Erik Opsahl is a professor of Medieval History, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. His fields of interest are aristocracy, nobility, state formation, political culture, national and other identities and loyalties, networks, military history, and migration in Medieval and Early Modern History Magne Njåstad is professor of late medieval and early modern history at the Department of Historical and Classical Studies at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology. His special interests are political and social history, focusing on local communities’ political actions and tools of action. Helen F. Leslie-Jacobsen is a researcher in Old Norse philology at the University of Bergen, Norway, where she leads a project on medieval and early modern Norwegian and Icelandic law funded by the Trond Mohn stiftelse. Her research interests include law, manuscripts, translation, ballads, and prosimetric Old Norse sagas. Philip Lavender is a researcher at the Department of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion at the University of Gothenburg, and author of Long Lives of Short Sagas: The Irrepressibility of Narrative and the Case of Illuga saga Gríðarfóstra. His research focuses on legendary sagas and Icelandic romances, studying reception, gender, forgery, futures, and ecocritical perspectives. Andrew McGillivray is assistant professor of rhetoric and communications at the University of Winnipeg. He is author of Influences of Pre-Christian Mythology and Christianity on Old Norse Poetry (2018). Martina Ceolin is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her current research focuses on the so-called ‘post-classical’ Íslendingasögur, specifically on Finnboga saga ramma and its codicological contexts. She is also preparing an Italian translation of Áns saga bogsveigis.