New publications, part 3 - Coinage, the Cult of Saints, and the Legitimization of Elites in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Poland and Norway

 

In the present blogpost, I wish to present the third and final of my three co-authored articles that were published in a recent volume (for the previous two, see here for the first one, and here for the second one). All these articles were written during my previous position, where I was a postdoctoral researacher at a project investigating the legitimisation of elites in medieval Norway and Poland, a collaboration between the University of Oslo and the University of Warsaw. 

This last article is titled "Coinage, the Cult of Saints, and the Legitimization of Elites in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Poland and Norway", co-authored with Mateusz Bogucki and Svein Gullbekk. The article takes as its starting-point the disparity in the use of saints on Norwegian coins compared with Polish coins. From this quandary, we examine how both coinage and the cult of saints could converge in the legitimisation of elites, or - on the contrary - had to be kept separate in order to avoid the legitimisation of the wrong kind of elites.    

Since I am a novice in numismatics, I was greatly aided in this article by my co-authors. The writing process was slow and at times agonising because of the very careful balance needed when trying to say something about general historical tendencies based on little and very uncertain material. But it was also a challenge that greatly expanded my horizon.