Lars Boje Mortensen CV

born in Copenhagen 1958. Cand.mag (1986) and Ph.D. (1989) at the dept. of Greek and Latin, University of Copenhagen. Professor of Medieval Latin at the University of Bergen since 1992. I have spent a year in London (1989) and in Bologna (1998-99) and been guest professor at Göteborg (2000).
Head of dept. og Greek and Latin in several periods. Coordinator of an interdisciplinary bachelor programme for medieval studies from 2002-04. Member of the Danish Society for Language and Literature since 1986, on the board from 2002. Member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences from 2003. Co-editor of the international Journal Symbolae Osloenses 2000-2004. Standing member of the Internationales Mittellateinerkomitee and SISMEL since 2006. In the Nordic medieval Centre (2005-2010) I am teamleader of the Culture group together with Tuomas Lehtonen (Helsinki).
I have been working with all periods of Latinity though mainly concentrating on the early and high Middle Ages (ca 550-1200). A main field of my research lies in literary, political, ideological and history-of-learning approaches to the historiographical tradition, e.g. my Ph.D. on Paul the Deacon and his History of the Lombards Civiliserede barbarer. Historikeren Paulus Diaconus og hans forgængere (1991) and the edition of Historia Norwegie (2003) plus a number of international articles.
Another main field lies in Danish and Norwegian medieval Latin literature and its relationship to classical or contemporary English, French or German Latin literature. In that connection I have written about relations between centre and periphery and contributed with comparative studies and surveys in literary history. In this field I am also taking part in the CMS projects on the Arrival of Writing and on Religion by developing my work on the role of Latin writing and its sacred functions.
Interdisciplinarity is a major trend in my work. To spread knowledge about the rich Latin literature of the Middle Ages beyond the basic philological analysis and to draw on other fields’ theoretical and empirical work are my main concerns. I have been inspired by scholars in media studies and have worked with them in a common project on rhetoric (1996-98) where I also taught book history as part of modern media studies. I have also done basic palaeography and codicology courses together with Old Norse studies. Recently I have taken up sociology of religion as well as some trends in philosophy of history and cultural theory.
At the CMS I am leading the project on the Construction of the Past. We published a volume on this theme in 2006 (The making of Christian Myths in the Periphery of Latin Christendom). I am also studying the uses of Roman history in the construction of a local past, and I am going to develop my work into a book-length study on the Appropriation on Ancient Rome in 11th- and 12th-century historiography. In this a comparison with eastern Europe is particularly promising.