Crown, Church, and Convent

This volume offers a new interdisciplinary knowledge about Norway’s medieval history and focuses on the role of the central medieval institutions – church, monasteries and royal administration – in the formation of the Norwegian medieval culture and society from the late Viking Ages to the late Middle Ages.

This volume brings together the recent findings of an interdisciplinary group of scholars investigating the intertwined roles of the Catholic Church and secular rulership in medieval Norwegian culture. The eleven contributions gathered here offer new perspectives on Norway’s history and illuminate how central medieval institutions — church, monasteries, and the royal household — shaped culture and society. Moving beyond a focus on bishops and rulers alone, the articles also bring to the fore the roles played by monks, nuns, parish priests, and scribes, whose activities and agency have hitherto received little scholarly attention. Covering the period from the late Viking Age to the late Middle Ages (eleventh to sixteenth centuries), this volume places particular emphasis on western Norway (Vestlandet) and on Bergen as a key medieval administrative centre. The contributors draw on approaches from archaeology, history, art history, and philology, and their analyses are grounded in a wide range of sources, including manuscripts, archaeological material, charters, and artefacts. Together, the studies provide a nuanced and richly documented account of medieval Norwegian culture and society through the lens of institutional and individual interaction.