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(What) Methodology in Medieval and Viking Studies? The Problems of Interdisciplinary Research

Luke John Murphy (University of Leicester) discusses methodological approaches to interdisciplinary research in the field of Medieval Studies.

Methodology
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The undertaking of what Medieval Studies – and its geographic, temporal, and cultural subset, Viking Studies – is undoubtedly a booming field of academic inquiry, with a growing number of research centres, study courses, and even university departments dedicated to its pursuit. Yet this is a field without common disciplinary grounding, its scholars coming to the study of, for example, “Viking culture” or “Medieval religion” from a variety of backgrounds. Their communal output is thoroughly interdisciplinary and students are often encouraged to educate themselves in neighbouring fields, yet there is little explicit cross-pollination of methods and theoretical approaches between the constitutive disciplines involved. This paper offers a perspective on how we, as scholars of historical societies such as Medieval Scandinavia organise and approach our data. 

It argues that despite the large number of academic disciplines represented in Medieval Studies, from philology to archaeology, most scholarship in this field can be situated towards one of two poles on a methodological spectrum. It is proposed that binary pairs of methodological approaches can be categorised into loose family groupings of “bottom-up” and “top-down” methodologies: emic and etic, deductive and inductive, Max Weber’s Idealtypenand Ferdinand Tönnies’ Normaltypen, and insiders’ and outsiders’ perspectives. The applicability of such different methodologies is then examined in two case studies: of “privacy” in the early Medieval North, and of “household cult” as a particular form of religion, and attempts to highlight the influence of our methodologies on the results that we scholars of Medieval and Viking Studies can draw from even a highly-restricted dataset. In doing so, this paper is not intended to advocate for a single common methodology of Viking Studies, but is rather intended to fan the flames of a more conscious methodological discourse in the study of early Medieval Scandinavia.

 

Luke John Murphy holds a PhD in the History of Religion from the University of Aarhus, where he wrote a dissertation on diversity in pre-Christian Nordic paganism. He has previously worked at the University of Iceland and University of Stockholm, and is presently working on a project about animal sacrifice in first-millennium Britain at the University of Leicester. More about him can be found on his website: luke-murphy.com

 

All interester parties are welcome!