In Frontiers for Peace in the Medieval North. The Norwegian-Scottish Frontier c. 1260-1470, Ian Peter Grohse examines social and political interactions in Orkney, a Norwegian-held province with long and intimate ties to the Scottish mainland. Commonly portrayed as the epicentre of political tension between Norwegian and Scottish fronts, Orkney appears here as a medium for diplomacy between monarchies and as an avenue for interface and cooperation between neighbouring communities. Removed from the national heartlands of Scandinavia and Britain, Orcadians fostered a distinctly local identity that, although rooted in Norwegian law and civic organization, featured a unique cultural accent engendered through Scottish immigration. This study of Orcadian experiences encourages greater appreciation of the peaceful dimensions of pre-modern European frontiers.

Explains the history of England's northern borderlands in the fifteenth century within a broader social, political and European context.

This book is the first of its kind to engage explicitly with the practice of conceptual history as it relates to the study of the Middle Ages, exploring the pay-offs and pitfalls of using concepts in medieval history. Concepts are indispensable to historians as a means of understanding past societies, but those concepts conjured in an effort to bring order to the infinite complexity of the past have a bad habit of taking on a life of their own and inordinately influencing historical interpretation. The most famous example is ‘feudalism’, whose fate as a concept is reviewed here by E.A.R. Brown nearly fifty years after her seminal article on the topic. The volume’s contributors offer a series of case studies of other concepts – 'colony', 'crisis', 'frontier', 'identity', 'magic', 'networks' and 'politics' – that have been influential, particularly among historians of Britain and Ireland in the later Middle Ages. The book explores the creative friction between historical ideas and analytical categories, and the potential for fresh and meaningful understandings to emerge from their dialogue.

This book examines the experiences and interconnections of the Reformations, principally in Denmark-Norway and Britain and Ireland (but with an eye to the broader Scandinavian landscape as well), and also discusses instances of similarities between the Reformations in both realms. The volume features a comprehensive introduction, and provides a broad survey of the beginnings and progress of the Catholic and Protestant Reformations in Northern Europe, while also highlighting themes of comparison that are common to all of the bloc under consideration, which will be of interest to Reformation scholars across this geographical region.

Discussion of medieval European expansion tends to focus on expansion eastward and the crusades. The selection of studies reprinted here, however, focuses on the other end of Eurasia, where dwelled the warlike Celts, and beyond whom lay the north seas and the awesome Atlantic Ocean, formidable obstacles to expansion westward. This volume looks first at the legacy of the Viking expansion which had briefly created a network stretching across the sea from Britain and Ireland to North America, and had demonstrated that the Atlantic could be crossed and land reached. The next sections deal with the English expansion in the western and northern British Isles. In the 12th century the Normans began the process of subjugating the Celts, thus inaugurating for the English an experience which was to prove crucial when colonizing the Americas in the 17th century. Medieval Ireland in particular served as a laboratory for the development of imperial institutions, attitudes, and ideologies that shaped the creation of the British Empire and served as a staging area for further expansion westward.

In recent years, the 'medieval frontier' has been the subject of extensive research. But the term has been understood in many different ways: political boundaries; fuzzy lines across which trade, religions and ideas cross; attitudes to other peoples and their customs. This book draws attention to the differences between the medieval and modern understanding of frontiers, questioning the traditional use of the concepts of 'frontier' and 'frontier society'. It contributes to the understanding of physical boundaries as well as metaphorical and ideological frontiers, thus providing a background to present-day issues of political and cultural delimitation. In a major introduction, David Abulafia analyses these various ambiguous meanings of the term 'frontier', in political, cultural and religious settings. The articles that follow span Europe from the Baltic to Iberia, from the Canary Islands to central Europe, Byzantium and the Crusader states. The authors ask what was perceived as a frontier during the Middle Ages? What was not seen as a frontier, despite the usage in modern scholarship? The articles focus on a number of themes to elucidate these two main questions. One is medieval ideology. This includes the analysis of medieval formulations of what frontiers should be and how rulers had a duty to defend and/or extend the frontiers; how frontiers were defined (often in a different way in rhetorical-ideological formulations than in practice); and how in certain areas frontier ideologies were created. The other main topic is the emergence of frontiers, how medieval people created frontiers to delimit areas, how they understood and described frontiers. The third theme is that of encounters, and a questioning of medieval attitudes to such encounters. To what extent did medieval observers see a frontier between themselves and other groups, and how does real interaction compare with ideological or narrative formulations of such interaction?

The medieval development of the distinct region of north-east England explored through close examination of landscape, religion and history. The recent surge of interest in the political, ecclesiastical, social and economic history of north-eastern England is reflected in the essays in this volume. The topics covered range widely, including the development of both rural and urban life and institutions. There are contributions on the well-known richness of Durham cathedral muniments, its priory and bishopric, and there is also a particular focus on the institutions and practices which evolved to deal with Scottish border problems. A number of papers broach lesser-known subjects which accordingly offer new territory for exploration, among them the distinctive characteristics of local jurisdiction in the northern counties, the formation of north-eastern landscapes, the course of agrarian development in the region and the emergence of a northern gentry class alongside the better known ecclesiastical and lay magnates. CHRISTIAN D. LIDDY is Lecturer in History at the University of Durham, where R.H. BRITNELL is Emeritus Professor.