Dr Paul Gazzoli writes:
In connection with my British
Academy-funded research project to produce a new edition of Rimbert’s Life
of Anskar, I and Dr Erik Niblaeus of Durham University are hosting a
conference this summer, on the 4th of July 2015 (the Saturday before
the Leeds International Medieval Congress). This will focus on Hamburg-Bremen
not only in Anskar’s day but through the time of the great chronicler Adam of
Bremen up through the end of the twelfth century.
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| Bremen cathedral |
Hamburg-Bremen, and the written
sources it produced in the middle ages, are essential to Scandinavian
historians: history-writing only began in Scandinavia in the 12th
century, and the Icelandic sagas were not written until the 13th
century. But Adam of Bremen wrote in the 1070s, and had the Danish King Svend
Estridsen (1047–76) as his informant, while Rimbert wrote the Life of Anskar
in the 860s or 870s (Anskar was the first Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen and
worked as a missionary among the Danes and Swedes from the 820s through the
850s, and his Life records much about Scandinavia during that time).
Thus both sources provide extremely valuable evidence for Scandinavia during
the Viking Age.
Part of Anskar’s legacy was
Hamburg-Bremen’s enduring claim to supremacy over all the Church in
Scandinavia. The creation of the archdiocese of Lund in 1104 mostly ended this,
but Hamburg-Bremen did try to regain Scandinavia through the twelfth century.
As part of this struggle, documents were forged, and sorting out truth from
falsehood has many important implications for the history not only of
Hamburg-Bremen but of Scandinavia. Scholars have also seen distortions in Adam
of Bremen’s work, and recently Eric Knibbs has argued that the falsification of
history goes back to the ninth century with Anskar and Rimbert themselves.
Against this difficult background, the
conference will be looking at a variety of types of evidence: Dr Britta Mischke
(of the University of Cologne) will look at the evidence of diplomas, while
Prof. Matthias Hardt (Leipzig) and Morten Søvsø (Sydvestjyske Museer) will be
discussing the archaeological traces of Christianisation among the Baltic Slavs
and southern Scandinavia respectively. Prof. Hans-Werner Goetz (Hamburg) will
be discussing Hamburg-Bremen’s claim on Scandinavia through the 11th
century, while Prof. Michael Gelting (Aberdeen/Danish National Archives) will
address Hamburg-Bremen’s struggle to control the Nordic church in the 12th
century. Dr Erik Niblaeus (Durham) will situate Hamburg-Bremen in its Salian
context, while Dr John-Henry Clay (Durham) will set Anskar against the
background of earlier missionaries in Germany. I (Paul Gazzoli, Cambridge) will
be talking about the transmission and re-writing of the Life of Anskar
at Bremen in the twelfth century. All papers will be followed by discussion.
We
hope you can join us to help make for a lively and valuable conference! More
information (including the schedule) will be available at https://hamburgbremen2015.wordpress.com/ while you can register here.
Registration is £18 (£13 for students) and includes morning and afternoon
tea/coffee, lunch and a wine reception. There will be a conference dinner at St
Catharine’s College, priced £35 (with wine £10 extra).
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| St Anskar, painting from the old Cathedral (torn down in the 19th century) in Hamburg |
