Becoming Christian: A Matter of Everyday Resistance and Negotiation

Abstract

The diverse appearances of church buildings, iconography and altered burial practices have commonly been used to exemplify the expansion of Christianity in early medieval Europe. Less emphasis has been placed on how the common European dealt with the Christian transformation in daily life, perhaps because of the tendency in research to distinguish ritual actions from secular. To become Christian did not necessarily entail greater religiousness or deeper religious devotion but centred rather on how people synchronized their everyday lives, both religious and secular, in accordance with Christian doctrine and the laws imposed by the Roman Church. However, social transformations do not emerge exclusively from political or administrative institutions, such as the Church or other ruling authority; they also emerge interactively, through the general public, who are equally capable of exercising power by taking part in societal discourse. With reference to examples from early medieval Iceland, this article argues for the application of Foucault's theory of power relations and everyday resistance to research on the adoption of Christianity, beyond time and space.

Crossing the Maelstrom: New Departures in Viking Archaeology

“…Price 2000;Spangen 2009). Studies of the Scandinavian conversions to Christianity, a focus of research in the 1980s and 1990s, have been fewer in the last decade (but see, e.g., Andrén 2013a; Kristjánsdóttir 2015;Lund 2013;Vésteinsson 2016). In the early 2000s, a group of studies pioneered new ways of incorporating written sources and archaeology in studies of pre-Christian or Old Norse worldviews.…”

Post-Yapısalcı Lensler İle Bir Yahudilik Okuması

“…Rather, the everyday lives of people contribute to the constitutions of religious practices, believes or ideologies within the context in which everyday life is experienced. 15 These constitutive factors can be discursive structures or leading figures such as intellectuals that produce knowledge about religious experiences and practices as well as material and social conditions. The language describing categories, practices, and experiences of religion, for instance, is a tool of the discursive structures of power.…”

“…Smart, Feminism and the Power of Law, 6.21 Peskowitz, Spinning Fantasies,15. 22 James Clifford, "The Others: Beyond the "salvage" paradigm", Third Text 3/6 (1989), 126.23 Peskowitz, Spinning Fantasies, 14.24 Peskowitz, Spinning Fantasies, 17. …”

An archeology of moments: Christian conversion and practice in a medieval household cemetery

“…Research on the early church in Iceland has been primarily historical, based in the later saga accounts and the extremely limited material on the spread of Christian practice and the institutionalization of the church in the century following the conversion (see for instance Hugason, 2000;Karlsson, 2004;Sigurôsson, 1999Sigurôsson, , 2014Stefa´nsson, 1978Stefa´nsson, , 1975. However, recent archeological work has demonstrated that although the institutional church was largely absent from Iceland, Christian household cemeteries and churches were established at a large number, perhaps the majority, of independent farms in the early 11th century (see for instance Byock et al, 2005;Gestsdo´ttir and Isaksen, 2014;Kristja´nsdo´ttir, 2004Kristja´nsdo´ttir, , 2015Sveinbjarnardo´ttir, 2009;Ve´steinsson, 2000;Zoe¨ga, 2014). With the lack of ecclesiastical organization and, probably, ordained ministers, households appear to have been largely left to their own as to how and where they buried their dead and the execution of burial rites likely were often in the hands of the household church owners themselves (Ve´steinsson, 2000;Zoe¨ga, 2014).…”