Imagining Nordic Paganism. Cultural Memories and Scholarly Thought Since the Middle Ages

International Conference

Scandinavian Pre-Christian religion has been an eminently productive part of identity constructions for numerous social groups from the 13th century until the present day. This conference brings together researchers from several countries and various disciplines in order to investigate why, by which means and to what ends diverse recipients at different times engaged in identitarian recourse to a religion that is accessible only from spatially or temporally external perspectives in the extant source material. In doing so, the conference encompasses a diachronic dimension, asking how subsequent processes of reception interrelate and how later acts of reception engage with notions of paganism established earlier in the history of reception. Furthermore, it aims at a synchronic layer, placing specific reception processes in the socio-political contexts and preconditions of their time. The contributions address a wide array of topics connected to the reception of pre-Christian religion in the North and beyond, such as the relation between gender and paganism, its connectivity to certain media, the spatial dimension of its reception, and, not least, identitarian recourses to paganism in historiography and the history of the discipline. Thus, turning to some particularly salient aspects of the reception history of paganism from the Middle Ages until recent times, the contributions aim at facilitating a better understanding of its special viability for identity constructions attested to by countless examples from eight centuries of imagining Nordic paganism.

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