Team II - Religion

Team Leaders

• Kurt Villads Jensen, University of Southern Denmark
• Torstein Jørgensen, CMS

The conversion of the Nordic countries has been the subject of considerable interest within each country, whereas little has been done concerning the region as a whole.

The study of Christianisation is not confined to the ‘missionary period’ in the narrow sense, but includes aspects of the penetration of Christianity into the Nordic countries throughout the Middle Ages. One starting-point is to get a clearer idea of the older religion that was replaced by Christianity. The textual basis for Northern paganism is late and transmitted only through Christian authors, whose reliability has been subject to much discussion. We want to address this discussion by dealing with the whole Nordic area, by studying the texts in close connection with archaeological and onomastic evidence.

Medieval Christianity is still incompletely understood, in the Nordic countries as well as in the rest of Europe, largely because we think that we know what Christianity is about. Recent years have, however, seen important steps towards a really historical understanding, not only of ‘popular’ religion but even more of the ‘official’, orthodox religion. These trends represent a challenge to Nordic scholarship as well which we want to take up by exploiting the rich but largely neglected material on medieval religion that still exists in our part of the world. The penetration of Christianity should be studied not only in the three Scandinavian kingdoms, but also in the neighbouring heathen countries, notably along the Baltic coast, that became the target of missionary crusades from around 1100 onwards.

Senior Researchers

Name	Location	Info
Prof. Torstein Jørgensen	CMS, University of Bergen	[info]
Dr. Kurt Villads Jensen	University of Southern Denmark, Odense	[info]
Dr Michael Anderson	The National Museum, Copenhagen	[info]
Dr Lars Bisgaard	University of Southern Denmark, Odense	[info]
Dr Jennifer Mcdonald	CMS, University of Bergen	[info]
Professor Stefan Brink	University of Aberdeen	[info]
Professor Torben Nielsen	University of Aalborg	[info]
Professor Christian Krötzl	University of Tampere
Dr Janus Møller Jensen	University of Southern Denmark, Odense	[info]
Docent Claes Gejrot	Swedish National Archives
Docent Markus Hiekkanen	Helsinki University
Dr Sæbjørg Walaker Nordeide	CMS, University of Bergen	[info]
Docent Kirsi Salonen	University of Tampere
Professor Bertil Nilsson	Dept. Religion, Göteborg University	[info]
Profsessor Else Mundal	CMS, University of Bergen	[info]
Previous:
Dr Haki Antonsson	CMS, University of Bergen	[info]