Katja Ritari

Alexandra Bergholm

This publication is the first interdisciplinary collection of articles focusing on religion and mythology in Celtic studies. The first part presents various current viewpoints within the field from scholars of history, art history and literary studies. In addition to more traditional approaches, the other two parts of the book illustrate the possibilities of applying new theories and methods from the discipline of Comparative Religion to the analysis of Celtic materials. They introduce previously unpublished results of the international research network “The Power of Words in Traditional European Cultures”, and the research project “Religion, Society, and Culture: Defining the Sacred in Early Irish Literature” funded by the Academy of Finland at University of Helsinki. The present collection serves as a significant contribution towards a better understanding of issues that have not been previously brought together in a single volume. As such it is of interest to scholars in Celtic studies as well as other related disciplines.

Approaches to Religion and Mythology in Celtic Studies

Kurt Villads Jensen

Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen

This book examines how the crusading ideology was formulated in medieval historiography and how the crusading movement affected Christianity and the world beyond. The second main theme is the spread of the crusading movement to Northern Europe, especially Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea area. Northerners not only participated in the crusades in the Holy Land, but also learned and were inspired to create and take part in a new crusading movement within the Baltic Sea region itself. The relationship between the crusades to Jerusalem and those in the North must be of fundamental importance to understanding the dynamics that created history, both locally and in a general European context, but this relation itself has seldom been the object of thoroughgoing research; on the contrary, the considerable scholarship on both the North and the South has been pursued in isolation. Divided into three parts, this volume opens with the different forms of and reactions to the crusading ideology. The importance of ideology as a driving motivation for the crusaders has again been recognised in international studies since the 1970s, and its impact is also now felt in Scandinavian research environments. The second part moves on to examine the crusading ideology and its impact upon society in a broader context through its relation to violence, its portrayal of the enemies, and its representations in the policy and construction of the Danish crown and royal mythology. The Northern Crusades in the Baltic Sea region are discussed in the third part as seen through contemporary sources and modern historical writing. This also includes dealing with some of the impacts of the Crusades in Russia and even farther east in Mongolia. The essays in this section show how the general idea of crusading was applied to the Northern areas and frequently resembles in its details the Mediterranean crusades, as well as demonstrate how Scandinavian scholars have often neglected this aspect in modern history writing.

Katja Ritari

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