Kim Esmark

Introduction to Part Two

This second part of the book focuses on local disputes related to property, family, and micropolitical networks. It presents a quantitative survey of all Danish charters from the thirteenth century, with the aim of mapping basic patterns of property disputes in this period. This part then takes a closer look at the records from one particular monastery, exploring the variety of strategies employed by litigants in cases of local dispute processing in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Denmark. It also shows how Swedish magnates granted daughters as pious gifts to nunneries, and discusses how such gifts contributed to creating social bonds and symbolic capital that could be useful in dispute settlement and local power politics. This introductory chapter provides an outline of social structures and property relations in the Scandinavian kingdoms, the legal foundation, and the nature of the source evidence employed in all four articles: charters. Keywords: Danish charters; dispute settlement; fourteenth-century Denmark; microplitical networks; property disputes; Scandinavian kingdoms; Swedish magnates

Doing pasts: authenticity from the reenactors’ perspective

Abstract This article investigates how authenticity is construed and negotiated in four different fields of reenactment practice in Denmark (Iron Age, Middle Age, World War II and Francis of Assisi). It first outlines some key theoretical positions within recent international academic debate on reenactment and living history. Taking the viewpoint of the reenactors themselves, the article explores and compares how they create, experience and negotiate authenticity in the very process of imitating and embodying pasts. It transpires that authenticity is articulated, construed and evaluated differently, according, inter alia, to whether the primarily purpose is to learn about the past or rather to learn from the past. For some reenactors, the attempt to get as close as possible to the past connects to an ideal of historical accuracy, a standard from which all replicas and performances are measured. Yet a pragmatic recognition that the past can never be recreated completely is constantly present. For other reenactors, the doing of pasts is a way of accessing experiences and values that are felt to have been lost in modernity. At the same time, however, it is all-important to them that the world they imitate is a past that actually existed and not a fictional universe.