Author: Frank Domínguez File Type: pdf A study and edition of one of the most ignored works of early Spanish literature because of its strong sexual content, this work examines the social ideology that conditioned the reactions of people to the events it describes as well as Fernando de Rojass masterpiece, Celestina.

Author: Jon Vidar Sigurdsson File Type: pdf To a faithful friend, straight are the roads and short.Odin, from the Havamal (c. 1000) Friendship was the most important social bond in Iceland and Norway during the Viking Age and the early Middle Ages. Far more significantly than kinship ties, it defined relations between chieftains, and between chieftains and householders. In Viking Friendship, Jon Vidar Sigurdsson explores the various ways in which friendship tied Icelandic and Norwegian societies together, its role in power struggles and ending conflicts, and how it shaped religious beliefs and practices both before and after the introduction of Christianity. Drawing on a wide range of Icelandic sagas and other sources, Sigurdsson details how loyalties between friends were established and maintained. The key elements of Viking friendship, he shows, were protection and generosity, which was most often expressed through gift giving and feasting. In a society without institutions that could guarantee support and security, these were crucial means of structuring mutual assistance. As a political force, friendship was essential in the decentralized Free State period in Icelands history (from its settlement about 800 until it came under Norwegian control in the years 12621264) as local chieftains vied for power and peace. In Norway, where authority was more centralized, kings attempted to use friendship to secure the loyalty of their subjects. The strong reciprocal demands of Viking friendship also informed the relationship that individuals had both with the Old Norse gods and, after 1000, with Christianitys God and saints. Addressing such other aspects as the possibility of friendship between women and the relationship between friendship and kinship, Sigurdsson concludes by tracing the decline of friendship as the fundamental social bond in Iceland as a consequence of Norwegian rule. **Review Jon Vidar Sigurdsson is one of the foremost historians of the Middle Ages working in Scandinavia today. In Viking Friendship he demonstrates how the trope of friendship was developed within discourses of power relations and how chieftains, kings, and bishops were able to exploit friendship to extend their growing power.Alex Woolf, University of St Andrews, author of From Pictland to Alba Scotland, 7891070 Medieval friendship complicates our notions of horizontal versus vertical social relationships, of natural versus manufactured social ties, of intimate affect versus alliances of political convenience, and incidentally also of gender roles, institutional structures, and the boundary between cooperation and competition. Friendship in the Middle Ages often bore a much more utilitarian, political profile than it does in the modern imagination. Tensions such as these are the terrain that Jon Vidar Sigurdssons book provocatively navigates. Viking Friendship offers a thorough, multifaceted survey of friendship in the Norse Middle Ages, making the rich Norse material accessible to scholars in other fields.Oren Falk, Cornell University, author of The Bare-Sarked Warrior A Brief Cultural History of Battlefield Exposure Viking Friendship is a valuable addition to the literature on the Vikings, and one which brings an original approach to the subject. This book is also notable in that it covers the Norwegian suppression of the Icelandic Commonwealth, itself a unique institution in European political history, from the perspective of the history of friendship.Julian Haseldine, University of Hull, editor of Friendship in Medieval Europe About the Author Jon Vidar Sigurdsson is a Professor in the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo. He is the author of several books, including Chieftains and Power in the Icelandic Commonwealth, and coeditor of Celtic-Norse Relationships in the Irish Sea in the Middle Ages 8001200, Friendship and Social Networks in Scandinavia, c. 10001800, and Ideology and Power in the Viking and Middle Ages Scandinavia, Iceland, Ireland, Orkney and the Faeroes.