Introduction: The Veneration of Saints in Early Christian Scandinavia and Eastern Europe

Abstract

This volume examines the cult of the saints and their associated literature in two peripheral regions of Christendom that were converted to Christianity around the turn of the first millennium, namely, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. The thirteen authors focus on how cultures of sanctity were transmitted across the two regions and on the role that neighbouring Christian countries like England, Germany, and Byzantium played in that process. The authors also ask to what extent the division between Latin Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy affected the early development of the cult of saints on the two peripheries. The first part of the book offers for the first time a comprehensive overview of the veneration of local and universal saints in Scandinavia and northern Rus’ from c. 1000 to c. 1200, with a particular emphasis on saints who were venerated in both regions. The second part presents examples of how some early hagiographic works produced on the northern and eastern peripheries borrowed, adapted, and transformed — i.e. contextualized — literary traditions from the Latin West and Byzantium.

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