The Self in Social Spaces: Conceptualizations and Representations in the Textual and Material Culture of Medieval Scandinavia

I 2021 har prosjektleder Stefka G. Eriksen arbeidet videre med hennes egen monografi "Minds and Mentalizing in Old Norse Literature and Culture", som diskuterer mentalisering i norrøn middelalder. Mentalisering er evnen å tenke om våre tanker, følelser og forestillinger. Dette er en kognitiv egenskap, som alle mennesker har, men som kan utvikles og forbedres på forskjellige måter, som for eksempel gjennom lesing. Hovedproblemstillingen i boka er hvordan forskjellige norrøne sjangrer og tekster inspirerte lesere i middelalderen til å mentalisere. Dette vil kunne fortelle oss noe nytt om rollen norrøn litteratur hadde for sitt publikums selv-forståelse, i relasjon til andre mennesker, til andre kulturer og religioner, i fortiden og i fremtiden. Boka vil ferdigstilles i løpet av 2021. I mai 2021, leverte prosjektets PhD kandidat, Karen Holmqvist, sin doktoravhandling til vurdering. Avhandlingen viser hvordan selvet er representert og uttrykt på forskjellige måter i rune- og latinske innskrifter, avhengig av hvor innskripsjonene er, og hvilket språk og skriftsystem er brukt. Avhandlingen består av 4 publiserte artikler og en kappe. Disputas er satt til 23. november 2021. I 2021 har det vært noe mer konferansevirksomhet i form av digitale konferanser. Prosjektleder har presentert sitt arbeid på følgende konferanser Multimodal Communication (Kina, desember 2020); Leeds International Medieval Congress (Juli 2021); Cognitive Futures in the Arts and Humanities (Ösnabruck, september 2021). I tillegg har hun formidlet resultater i Morgenbladets AYF spalte, forskning.no-ung, og på faglige seminarer (Foreningen middelalder Oslo; Collegium Medievale; Forskningsuken NIKU).

The project has had great impact on the participants? careers, on various sciences, and public debates. The PI has, for example, been invited to give a keynote lecture at an international conference on Multimodal Communication and to contribute to a session on ?Cognitive Engineering in the Middle Ages?, organized by Mark Turner, at the international conference Cognitive Sciences in the Arts and Humanities (Ösnabruck, September 2021). The project has proposed a new conceptualization of the self and has approached Old Norse sources from new theoretical perspectives, inspired by cognitive studies. The project has provided an excellent arena for cooperation between disciplines, such as philology and literary studies, history, art-history, and archeology, as well as cognitive studies, psychology, and sociology. The PI and the PhD candidate have both communicated new knowledge about the self, self-awareness, and mentalizing in the Middle Ages to a broader public audience (see results).

A central concern of the humanities is to understand how the self relates to its world and to history, and consequently how this relationship is conceptualized and represented in textual culture. This project will contribute to the discussion by redefining the self as a result of the cognitive process of self-awareness, without neglecting the significance of the self's embodiment and surrounding culture. The main area of investigation will be Old Norse literature which contains traditional medieval genres in translation, as well as highly distinct genres, such as the Icelandic family sagas. These sagas are individual and family biographies from the period of settlement of Iceland, stories about social feuds and honor, pagan past and Christian identity. The sagas exhibit significant debts to foreign cultural impulses while simultaneously being unique compared to other medieval, and modern, literatures. Thus, the Scandinavian material has great, but as yet unexploited, potential to elucidate (1) the significance of self-awareness for one's own agency in literature, depending on the linguistic, discourse, and cultural context; and (2) the link between the cognition and agency given to literary characters and attitudes to cognition and agency in contemporary social spaces. This investigation will utilize theories of 'distributed cognition' (cognitive sciences) and 'artefactual textuality' (philology), both of which foreground human agency and the cognitive processes that underlie the production of textual culture. The two main questions will be studied based on different types of textual material (manuscript versions of literary texts and charters) and by systematically combining methods that previously have only been used independently. This theoretically and methodologically innovative study of unique material will contribute fresh perspectives to discussions of the medieval and modern self, in Scandinavia and in Europe.