IMC 2011: Sessions

The session celebrates the launching of an interdisciplinary research project on medieval Danish historiography. The project aims to revitalise research into Danish narrative sources from the period c. 1100-1220 by making use of the results obtained in international scholarship during the last decades on the socio-cultural and intellectual background of narrative historical texts, in order to place the Danish texts more precisely in a European context. Moreover, this part of the project is conceived to interact with the establishing of a lexicological and stylometric profile for a select corpus of medieval Latin texts from Denmark, in order to facilitate the finding of European texts which show similar features, and thereby make it feasible to investigate possible intellectual interrelations. The first paper deals with one of the oldest surviving Scandinavian narrative texts, Ælnoth of Canterbury's Gesta et passio (composed 1110 x 1124), which describes the murder, culting, and eventual papal canonisation of Knud IV of Denmark. Composed for the benefit of a newly established house of English Benedictines at Odense, the Gesta is the product of a textual community still wholly dependent upon imported literary models. The second paper examines the problems of transmission of the works of the late 12th-century Danish historian, Sven Aggeson, which survive only in two differing early-modern transcriptions. The preparation of a new edition thus represents a particular challenge. The third paper takes a closer look at the two chronicles by Ralph Niger from the 1190s that contain significant passages on more ancient as well as contemporary Danish history. Among European writers, Ralph seems to have been exceptionally well-informed about Danish affairs – information that he may have gathered during his stay in Rheims, a milieu that served as a locus of literary and cultural transfer between Denmark and the Continent.