Imagining Universal Government At The Edge Of The World: Institutional Forms In Norse Bishops’ Lives

The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries witnessed the dramatic growth of a legal and governmental apparatus centered at the papal court, as well as the widespread use of document-based forms of administration throughout Christendom. This project examines some of the ways in which writers and communities on the northern periphery of medieval Europe recruited, refashioned, and repurposed the legal principles and official documents of the universal Church for their own ends. Focusing specifically on a group of medieval Icelandic texts known as the bishops' sagas, it demonstrates how Norse clerics deployed fictitious papal documents and imagined canonical-legal procedures in order to legitimize some of the thoroughly abnormal practices of Iceland's native bishops.2023-08-1