The main concern of my PhD project is the social significance of the earliest surviving religious documents from medieval Iceland during the first three centuries of Christianity in Iceland (11th, 12th, and 13th century). In addition to exploring the most important theological traditions and religious ideas reflected by the texts and placing them in the historical and social context of the ongoing process of the Christianization of Iceland, the study also seeks to analyze critically these emerging religious discourses and their role in the sociopolitical landscape of the period. Central to that line of questioning is the hypothesis, developed within the critical interpretive framework of imperial hermeneutics, that the emerging Christian textual corpus served as an instrument for sustaining and enforcing the modus operandi of an empire seeking power and influence – in this case the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical empire as it sought to gain ground in the North. To that end, the project intends to explore the links between prevalent discursive themes in the writings under inspection – such as the church’s self-representation as a “power over”, the ecclesiastical “other” and punishment – and the sociohistorical context in which they emerged.

Commentator: Richard Cole (University College London and Aarhus University)