Peace, Law, and Space in the Medieval North

by Fraser Miller

Friday 13 Sept 2024, 16:00 → 17:30 Europe/Stockholm

Albano 3: 6203 - Floor 6 Large Lunch Room (44 seats) (Albano Building 3)

Today’s ScientiFika talk will be taking a slightly different spin on space and time then what you may be used to. Rather than looking out far up above the Earth and at the invisible natural forces that hold us together, we will look around at each other and back in time to better understand some other invisible forces, no less relevant to our everyday lives, and how these forces shaped society many centuries ago. We will be doing so by exploring the idea of peace. Peace was an enigmatic and omnipresent concept in the Middle Ages. Then, as today, it was used as a rhetorical device to condemn the use of violence by certain parties, while justifying its use by others. But while today we often understand the concept in relation to its antonym, war, in the Middle Ages it was more or less synonymous with the idea of law and order, or more specifically a “right” social order. In this talk, I will introduce some of the varying conceptions of peace in the Middle Ages, before zooming in to focus on how these conceptions, assuming a legislative form, became used to transform Nordic society in the High Middle Ages.