New publication: Helgenkult og institusjonell identitet i mellomalderen - Sunnivakulten i Bergen

A couple of months ago, I was approached by the editors of the in-house journal of the history students at the University of Oslo, Fortid (Past), who asked if I would contribute a text to their upcoming volume. This journal, the only one of its kind among history students in Norway, is an excellent venue for publishing scholarship across the full spectrum of experience that can be found at a department such as ours. I was very happy to be asked, not only because it is always a delight to be approached about publications, but also because it was an excellent opportunity for me to put together some thoughts about a topic that has been on my mind for a while, but that I have not yet had time to develop, namely the cult of Saint Sunniva of Selja and her veneration in Bergen. Thanks to the editors of Fortid, who were wonderfully professional in the process, I was able to piece together a few things that I can build on in my later work. 

The article is in Norwegian, and as of yet there is no digital version to be disseminated, so a brief summary here must suffice. The Norwegian title reads "The cult of saints and institutional identity in the Middle Ages - the cult of Saint Sunniva in Bergen". This topic was chosen because the theme of this issue - number 3, 2022 - was institutions, and I was approached to write something about institutional identity since I have worked a lot on that concept for much of my fledgling academic career. Institutional identity, how it is formed and how it is connected to the cult of saints, was the core of my PhD thesis, and it has proven to be a very fruitful framework for exploring source material pertaining to saints. In this article, I took as my starting point the translation of relics said to belong to Sunniva of Selja, which were brought to Bergen from the island of Selja in 1170. Sunniva was named as the leader of a group of Irish Christians who landed on the Western Norwegian island sometime in the late tenth century, and several texts - which are either lost or survive in late text witnesses - were composed in the wake of her translation. The cult was in place already in the eleventh century, but the figure of Sunniva first appeared in 1170 and became venerated as the patron of Bergen. 

Due to the limited scope of the article, I focussed mainly on outlining the theoretical concept of institutional identity, how it worked in medieval religious institutions, and how we can see such identity-formation in the surviving material for Sunniva. One day I hope to write a more comprehensive and exhaustive article about the Sunniva texts, but for now I have been able to put my thoughts in order and provided a good starting point for future writing.