Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland
This Spattered Isle
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Published:1st Apr '21
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Historians spend a lot of time thinking about violence: bloodshed and feats of heroism punctuate practically every narration of the past. Yet historians have been slow to subject 'violence' itself to conceptual analysis. What aspects of the past do we designate violent? To what methodological assumptions do we commit ourselves when we employ this term? How may we approach the category 'violence' in a specifically historical way, and what is it that we explain when we write its history? Astonishingly, such questions are seldom even voiced, much less debated, in the historical literature. Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland: This Spattered Isle lays out a cultural history model for understanding violence. Using interdisciplinary tools, it argues that violence is a positively constructed asset, deployed along three principal axes - power, signification, and risk. Analysing violence in instrumental terms, as an attempt to coerce others, focuses on power. Analysing it in symbolic terms, as an attempt to communicate meanings, focuses on signification. Finally, analysing it in cognitive terms, as an attempt to exercise agency despite imperfect control over circumstances, focuses on risk. Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland explores a place and time notorious for its rampant violence. Iceland's famous sagas hold treasure troves of circumstantial data, ideally suited for past-tense ethnography, yet demand that the reader come up with subtle and innovative methodologies for recovering histories from their stories. The sagas throw into sharp relief the kinds of analytic insights we obtain through cultural interpretation, offering lessons that apply to other epochs too.
This is a sophisticated and thought provoking book. * Chris Callow, Early Medieval Europe *
Violence and Risk is a most stimulating book that provides new perspectives on wellknown aspects of the family sagas and the contemporary sagas...His readings also provide new possibilities for examining the topic of fate and its transformation from a passively endured determination to the result of one's choices. * Stefanie Gropper, Speculum *
This new book, by Oren Falk, takes a fresh look at violence as a phenomenon in the saga corpus. Falk propounds a complex and persuasive analysis of violence, as being concerned not only with the exercise of power and the creation of symbolic significance, but also-as his title signals-with risk. * Carolyne Larrington, St John's College, Oxford, UK, The English Historical Review *
An ambitious, thought-provoking work ... The author seamlessly blends Iceland's literature and its complex history with his insights on and theory of violence in this intriguing and well-constructed work that will challenge readers to rethink their understanding of Iceland, its history, and historical approaches to violence. * A. E. Leykam, CHOICE *
[…] this is a useful and entertaining book that adds a lot to the scholarly debate on the medieval period in Iceland an introduces a new theoretical approach to studies of pre-modern violence. * Sverrir Jakobson, Saga-Book *
This book stands as a major theoretical contribution to the investigation of violence in medieval Iceland. By emphasising the importance of risk in shaping the communicative and constructive potential of violence, Falk opens up innovative ways of interpreting the sagas; in particular, his work enables a far deeper understanding of how agency worked in Iceland than has previously been possible. The book is also enjoyably well written; Falk writes with humour and verve, and though he deals with complex theories, these are communicated in clear and accessible terms. More broadly, Falk's superb account of historiographical approaches to violence gives the work potential for historians seeking to study violence in other past contexts, especially in societies characterised by feudlike violence. * Alexander Wilson, H-Soz-Kult *
ISBN: 9780198866046
Dimensions: 241mm x 161mm x 27mm
Weight: 726g
374 pages