For four hundred years, Norse settlers battled to make southern Greenland a new, sustainable home. They strove against gales and winter cold, food shortages and in the end a shifting climate. The remnants they left behind speak of their determination to wrest an existence at the foot of this vast, icy and challenging wilderness. Yet finally, seemingly suddenly, they vanished; and their mysterious disappearance in the fifteenth century has posed a riddle to scholars ever since. What happene...

This study traces the links between William Blake's ideas and radical Christian cultures in late eighteenth-century England. Drawing on a significant number of historical sources, Robert W. Rix examines how Blake and his contemporaries re-appropriated the sources they read within new cultural and political frameworks. By unravelling their strategies, the book opens up a new perspective on what has often been seen as Blake's individual and idiosyncratic ideas. We are also presented with the...

This bookexamines the sustained interest in legends of the pagan and peripheral North, tracing and analyzing the use of an ‘out-of-Scandinavia’ legend (Scandinavia as an ancestral homeland) in a wide range of medieval texts from all over Europe, with a focus on the Anglo-Saxon tradition. The pagan North was an imaginative region, which attracted a number of conflicting interpretations. To Christian Europe, the pagan North was an abject Other, but it also symbolized a place from which ances...

Nordic Romanticism: Translation, Transmission, Transformation is an edited collection exploring the varied and complex interactions between national romanticisms in Britain, Denmark, Germany, Norway and Sweden. The collection considers both the reception and influence of Nordic romanticism in Britain and Germany and also the reciprocal impact of British and German romanticism in the Nordic countries. Taken as a whole, the volume suggests that to fully understand the range of these...

Considering the fact that Charles Pigott's satirical A Political Dictionary (1795) is regularly quoted and referred to in analyses of late eighteenth-century radical culture, it is surprising that until now it has remained unavailable to readers outside of a few specialised research libraries. Until his death on the 24th of June 1794, Pigott was one of England's most prolific satirists in the decade of revolutionary unrest following the French Revolution, writing a number of pamphlets and ...

In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature, Scandinavia emerged as a setting for Gothic terror. This book explores the extensive use of Nordic superstition as it provided a vocabulary for Gothic texts, examining the cultural significance these references held for writers exploring Britain’s northern heritage. In Gothic publications, Nordic superstition sometimes parallels the representations of Catholicism, allowing writers to gloat at its phantasms and delusions. ...

Discover the evidence that Vikings walked on American soil—centuries before Columbus.When Columbus claimed to have discovered America in 1492 and the Borgia pope declared it a New World for Catholic Spain, the Vatican started a five-hundred-year conspiracy to conceal the true story of Viking America.In this groundbreaking new work by the author of The Early English Settlement of Orkney and Shetland, the true extent of the Viking discovery and colon...

“A splendidly pithy and provocative introduction to the culture of Romanticism.”—The Sunday Times“[Tim Blanning is] in a particularly good position to speak of the arrival of Romanticism on the Euorpean scene, and he does so with a verve, a breadth, and an authority that exceed every expectation.”—National ReviewFrom the preeminent historian of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries comes a superb, concise accou...

Peter Ackroyd has been praised as one of the greatest living chroniclers of Britain and its people. In Rebellion, he continues his dazzling account of the history of England, beginning with the progress south of the Scottish king, James VI, who on the death of Elizabeth I became the first Stuart king of England, and ending with the deposition and flight into exile of his grandson, James II.The Stuart monarchy brought together the two nations of England and Scotland into on...

'Though stronger evidence of this horrid practice prevailing among the inhabitants of this coast will scarcely be required, we have still stronger to give.' - Captain James Cook This Horrid Practice uncovers an unexplored taboo of New Zealand history - the widespread practice of cannibalism in pre-European Maori society. Until now, many historians have tried to avoid it and many Maori have considered it a subject best kept quiet about in public. Paul Moon brings together an impres...

A biography of the renowned existentialist's life and creativity, and a searching exploration of how to be a human being in the world.Søren Kierkegaard is one of the most passionate and challenging of all modern philosophers, and is often regarded as the founder of existentialism. Over about a decade in the 1840s and 1850s, writings poured from his pen pursuing the question of existence—how to be a human being in the world?—while exploring the possibilities of Chri...