Title: North of the Baltic? Faring the Bothnian Sea in a Viking World
Summary: This presentation addresses the conceptual barrier that separates the Gulf of Bothnia from the rest of the Baltic Sea, especially from a Swedish perspective. Whilst research emphasis more recently has been directed towards integrating the northern inland areas into a shared ‘Viking world’, the Åland Islands still appear as the northern point of Viking Ag Sea-faring along the Swedish coastline. Although an East-Western movement across the Bothnian Sea is frequently discussed, a North-Southern Sea passage is absent from discourse. Is this reflecting a physical absence or is there reason open up a new route.
Bio: Charlotta Hillerdal, is a Reader in Archaeology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. With a dual research focus on Viking Age Archaeology and Indigenous and Community Archaeology in the Arctic and sub-Arctic, she has focused on topics concerning cultural interaction, group identities, representation, co-creation, and climate change. More recently her interest has been directed towards perceived ‘marginal’ or ‘peripheral’ parts of the Viking diaspora, such as Northern Fennoscandia and the Northern Isles of Scotland. Recent publications include the volume Re-imagining Periphery (2020), co-edited with Professor Kristin Ilves, and the forthcoming volume Harvesting the Margins of the Viking World, also co-edited with Professor Ilves.
Title: Unveiling ritual dynamics: local practices or specialist rites in Åland’s Late Iron Age
Summary: This presentation focuses on small paw-like clay figurines found in Nordic Late Iron Age (550-1050 CE) burial mounds on the Åland Islands. The widespread clay paw burial rite highlights that different parts of the islands were part of the same cultural sphere, influenced by both ancestral traditions and ongoing cultural changes. However, the frequency and distribution of this rite vary across Åland, suggesting that only a select few were buried in this manner, based on criteria unknown to us. My study explores whether the figurines point to a household and/or private religion with individual farms or villages performing funeral rituals at the local level, or if they indicate ritual specialization. Using results from elemental fingerprinting and comparative analysis of clay artefacts, I argue that these burials were managed by skilled ritual experts rather than being an ad hoc practice. It is likely that a specific clay source was used for these rituals, distinct from that used for everyday pottery.
Bio: Kristin Ilves is a tenure-track Professor in Maritime Archaeology at the University of Helsinki. She received her PhD in archaeology from Uppsala University in 2012; she has been working at the University of Helsinki since 2018. Her research combines theoretical insights with a robust empirical approach to address problems that have lost something of their complexity to un-reflected traditional scientific understanding. Interested in maritime cultural landscapes, she is currently focusing on relating climate, environment, and culture change to each other and is particularly drawn to the construction of island identities.
Title: Rituals on the road? Pilgrimages as lived religion in medieval Finland
Summary: Sari Katajala-Peltomaa will discuss pilgrimages as an element of lived religion. By comparing depositions in late medieval canonization processes from Southern and Northern Europe, she highlights regional characteristics in rituals practices: the rich ritual “language” in the Italian urban shrines and longer travelling distances and more hierarchal and restricted practices in the North. To gain a fuller picture of the Finnish pilgrimage experience, Nordic sermons to pilgrims will also be analyzed.
Bio: Sari Katajala-Peltomaa is an expert on late medieval religion on a comparative European level. She has focused mainly on lay religiosity and lived religion within the context of hagiographic sources and especially canonization processes. She has studied rituals like pilgrimages and most recently cases of demonic possession, which is also linked to the ideas of mental disorder. Other areas of interest are gender, family and childhood.
Title: A land of extremes – Natural preconditions of the north as guiding factors for human interaction during the Late Iron Age (c. 800–1300 AD)
Summary: Northern Fennoscandia is not composed of a single landscape but of various landscapes with diverging qualities, all of which have set certain preconditions for human action and interaction. In this presentation the north is examined from a Braudelian perspective where the geography, topography and seasonal changes form the longue durée that sets the pace and precondition for human action. It is shown that the northern societies of the Late Iron Age not only knew how to live and survive in the north, they also apparently knew how to utilise the natural traits of their living environment to gain an advantageous position vis-à-vis their trading partners coming to the north from other regions.
Bio: Jari-Matti Kuusela is the archaeologist of the Regional Museum of Lapland and a docent of archaeology at the University of Oulu. He earned his PhD in archaeology in 2013 studying the formation of elite strata among the Bronze- and Iron Age societies along the Finnish side of the Bothnian bay coast. Since then he has studied the trade- and interaction networks of Late Iron Age and Medieval northern Fennoscandia. Currently he is focusing on a research project studying the Late Iron Age and Middle Ages of Eastern Lapland.
Title: Salt, glass, ceramics, and art: Late-medieval and early modern coastal connections between Southern Finland and Tallinn
Summary: The paper examines, mainly through archaeological and art historical lenses, the visual and material heritage of coastal villages, and focus on the Helsinga church as one of the focal points in the region. We will discuss the lively contacts the inhabitants of the Helsinga parish had with Tallinn and how these interactions are visible in the everyday material culture of the area. The local peasants used similar objects as burghers in Tallinn, acquired by their contact net of trading partners, friends, and family members who had moved to the town to work or start a family. Both the numerous, and cumulative, archaeological finds as well as the traded art works illustrate how the connections between Uusimaa and Tallinn were present in both secular and religious life in a very concrete and visible way.
Bio: Elina Räsänen is an art historian, specializing in the later medieval art of northern Europe particularly in the Baltic Sea region. Her studies are related in the main to object biography, fragmentation, iconoclasm, and breakage. Räsänen is Senior University Lecturer in the Department of Art History at Helsinki and holds the title of Docent of Medieval Art at the Åbo Akademi.
Bio: Tuuli Heinonen is an archaeologist specialized in the medieval and early modern periods. She completed her PhD in archaeology at the University of Helsinki in 2021. In her research, she has focused on the Iron Age and medieval settlement history of southern Finland, the material and social aspects of rural life in the Middle Ages and trading networks in the northern Baltic area. Currently she is working as a post-doctoral researcher in the Europeanization of Finland and Karelian Isthmus AD 1200-1600, focusing on the material culture of medieval castles and the relationship between castles and their environment in southern Finland.
Title: Reflections on the religious landscape in the Meditationes vitae Christi
Summary: A longish Latin text containing meditations on the life of Christ became a bestseller in the fourteenth-fifteenth century. It was translated into many vernaculars and it spread rapidly to monasteries and spiritual houses all over Europe. It had wide impact on sermons and also piety in private homes. I will examine in my paper on what I suggest is the core issue of the text: it offered not only a consolation but a final answer for people in physical, spiritual or mental pain. It was not about getting rid of the pain. It was about God, who understood the human pain hundred percent and that was in the core of the consolation. This book encapsulates what the practice of affective meditation is about. It also opens a religious landscape that looks totally different from the one with a demanding and fearful God and emphasis on people’s sinful lives.
Bio: Päivi Salmesvuori is Professor of Church History at the University of Åbo Akademi. Her fields of expertise include medieval gender history and history of saints.
Title: Landscape as experience: forest and lived religion in Early Modern Finland
Summary: The paper looks how landscape built experiences of religion in early modern Finland by looking at the (sometimes ad hoc) rituals of communicating with the supernatural in the wild forests and the roads through the forests in early modern Finland. Using evidence from the court record narratives on minor crimes of superstition in secular district courts and seventeenth-century village maps, the paper proposes that elements of landscape, such as roads, forests and rocks shaped experiences of religion – and experiences of religion then in turn shaped ideas of what a road, a forest or a rock was as a space and a location.
Bio: Raisa Maria Toivo has worked mainly on the history of lived religion, magic and witchcraft in the early modern period, but also on all the things that the history of witchcraft usually takes people to: gender, family, power, law, crime, violence, emotion and experience.
Title: Transitions in dynamic northern Norwegian multiethnic maritime environments from the Late Iron Age to medieval period
Summary: This presentation discusses transitioning relationships to marine resources and trade among the coastal Sami accompanying the shift from marine mammal oil production to fish oil in the medieval period - a dramatic transformation for these communities that has been under communicated and subsumed within a Norse cultural explanatory framework. This transformation of maritime relations also impacted ritual expressions among the coastal Sami, including offering sites.
Bio: Stephen Wickler is a maritime archaeologist at the University Museum of Arctic Norway with a broad range of interests related to northern coastal and island settlement. His current research focuses on understanding the complexities of transitions in maritime subsistence, trade, and ritual expressions since the Iron Age within multiethnic contexts. The critical role of seagoing vessels, including hybrid boats integrating Sámi and Norse elements, is one line of inquiry. Shifts in the framework of the all-important stockfish (dried cod) trade prioritizing the perspective of maritime communities responsible for production rather than middlemen and consumers is another source of insights.
Title: The Lake of Subiaco and Medieval Monastic Perceptions of Water
Summary: In his presentation, Teemu Immonen examines the symbolic perceptions of water held by Benedictine monks in High Medieval Southern Italy. He focuses particularly on Subiaco, the site where Benedict of Nursia, the father of Western monasticism, began his monastic journey in the early 6th century. The location featured an artificial lake constructed by Emperor Nero, which played a significant role in the scenes of the hagiography written about Benedict. In his talk, Immonen explores how these stories and their subsequent visual representations influenced later monks’ understanding of water: How did a monk conceptualize a lake when he saw one?
Bio: Teemu Immonen is a medievalist from University of Turku who specializes in the history of monasticism in Italy. His research extensively utilizes both textual and visual sources. Currently, Immonen is leading a project that examines monks’ perceptions of forests in High Medieval Southern Italy.