Team III - Culture

Team Leaders

• Tuomas Lehtonen, The Finnish Literature Society
• Lars Boje Mortensen, CMS

The Culture Team has two main fields of research. The first is concerned with literacy, the second with the construction of the past - in the Middle Ages and beyond.

Literacy: The written word was a crucial instrument in the spread of the Christian religion as well as in the development the dominating political institutions of the High and Later Middle Ages, thus linking the three Nordic kingdoms to the common culture of Western Christendom.

The significance of literacy in the Nordic countries during the Middle Ages has become much clearer in the last two decades. This has had an effect on the disciplines mainly concerned with writing, but has also cross-fertilized into fields of administrative and legal history. In brief one can say that the importance attached to the circumstances of writing (and reading) has grown in all the historical fields.

The study of orality is a natural counterpart to that of literacy. The study of oral culture can give us valuable glimpses of older, indigenous traditions as well as of the reception of the elite culture by the large illiterate majority.

The construction of the past: In Denmark, Norway and Iceland the great literature of the golden age of medieval writing was to some extent copied and used, to some extent neglected. A deeper comparison and analysis is needed of textual transmission and production mechanisms between the Western Nordic and Eastern Nordic ‘historical’ culture, or constructions of the past, and of the various late medieval uses of local saints as important signposts for regional identity.

Not only did the various medieval periods construct, or privilege, certain pasts of their own in line with a given development of statehood and written culture, all the subsequent periods up to the present have stressed special features in the ‘creation’ of their own Middle Ages. Another geographical and chronological extension of the ongoing research on the rise of these traditions is the focus on the importance of the medieval heritage in later stages of national identity building. The 19th century singles itself out as the period par excellence which created the Middle Ages with which we still work. A comparative investigation of 19th century Nordic medievalism would enhance the understanding of our own modern ‘Europeanism’ which strives to overcome the national exaggerations and ‘exceptionalism’ of the 19th and 20th centuries, but which also relies heavily on that research for a new comparative agenda.

Senior Researchers

Name	Location	Info
Prof. Lars Boje Mortensen		[info]
Dr. Tuomas Lehtonen	The Finnish Literature Society	[info]
Professor Pertti Anttonen	Institute for Cultural Research, University of Helsinki	[info]
Professor Veikko Anttonen	University of Turku/Head of School of Cultural Research	[info]
Dr Aidan Conti	CMS, University of Bergen	[info]
Docent Lauri Harvilahti	Univ of Helsinki & Univ of Turku/Director of Folklore Archives of Finnish Literature Society, Helsinki
Docent Tuomas Heikkilä	Univ of Helsinki	[info]
Docent Henrik Janson	Göteborg University
Dr Slavica Rankovic	CMS, University of Bergen	[info]
Dr Anders Melkersson	Göteborg University	[info]
Professor Else Mundal	CMS, University of Bergen	[info]
Dr Senni Timonen	Finnish Literature Society
Dr Leif Søndergaard	University of Southern Denmark, Odense	[info]
Dr Irma-Riitta Järvinen	Finnish Literature Society
Dr. Åslaug Ommundsen	CMS, University of Bergen
Dr. Jonas Wellendorf	CMS, University of Bergen
Previous:
Docent Ingmar Söhrman	Göteborg University