Professur für Mittelalterliche Geschichte (Späteres Mittelalter) Habilitation Dr. Aaron Vanides
From the North Sea to North America: Adam of Bremen and the Discovery of the Middle Ages
Over the course of the Middle Ages, the northernmost regions of the earth — notorious since classical antiquity as a terra inhabitabilis — became objects of growing fascination and exploration. From as far south as Mamluk Egypt, Norman Sicily, and Baghdad, through the canals of Venice and the ports of Barcelona, across continental Europe to Bruges and the British Isles, the North became a source of new opportunity: for knowledge, relationships, goods, the imagination, and even salvation. With its extreme landscapes, frigid climates, bizarre customs, and mythical fauna, the North Atlantic world emerged not simply as a geographic periphery, but as a conceptual frontier. And by the 16th century, this world was increasingly historicized as distinctly medieval — a temporal as well as spatial threshold.
By the end of the 15th century, one name came to dominate that retrospective imagination: Adam of Bremen, an 11th-century cleric from southern Germany, whose episcopal chronicle was initially composed to legitimize the faltering claims of the Archdiocese of Hamburg-Bremen to missionary authority in Scandinavia and the North Atlantic. But over the centuries, Adam's text was reshaped by transmission, commentary, translation, and reinterpretation. By the early modern period, it was celebrated less as a piece of institutional history and more for its fourth book, with its vivid depictions of the northern world: heathen temples made of gold, sacred groves, warrior-kings and forgotten cities, human sacrifice, Norse deities, polar marvels, and, most famously, an Atlantic island called Vinland. Adam's passing reference to Vinland anchored his reputation as the first known written source for Norse exploration of the Americas, embedding him in nationalist, colonial, and antiquarian narratives that long outlived his original ecclesiastical context.
This study, From the North Sea to North America: Adam of Bremen and the Discovery of the Middle Ages, examines how a local chronicle of episcopal ambition became a foundational text in the construction of the northern world and the medieval past. It is organized around what I call the “Four Ages of Adam” — a conceptual framework adapted from the medieval traditions of interpreting the life-cycle that allows me to trace the evolving form, function, and meaning of Adam of Bremen's chronicle over time.
The First Age explores Adam’s origins, methods, and aims: a displaced cleric in a faltering see, composing a narrative to secure institutional authority on the northern frontier.
The Second Age follows the manuscript transmission and reception of the Gesta from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, a period in which the chronicle was continuously reshaped by scholia, excerpted by other historians, and increasingly prized for its geographic rather than ecclesiastical content.
The Third Age examines how the Reformation in the North, despite rejecting the institutional church Adam sought to legitimize, turned to medieval texts — including the Gesta — in the service of national antiquarianism, manuscript collecting, and early historical scholarship. Cartographers like Gerhard Mercator drew upon medieval texts and tropes to describe the North, just as early modern Gothicism proclaimed the distinctly medieval character of the far north.
The Fourth Age traces how Adam's chronicle entered modern debates about medieval geography, pre-Columbian exploration, and the imagined medieval origins of Europe’s presence in the Americas — what I describe as the “medieval colonialism” of modern America.
This study is thus not simply a reception history of a medieval text, but an investigation into how the Middle Ages themselves are constructed, revised, and mobilized through the afterlives of specific works. Adam’s Gesta, I argue, is not just an early source for northern history — it is a site through which that history was, and continues to be, imagined. And yet despite its ubiquity in medieval scholarship, Adam of Bremen and his work have rarely been examined in their fuller textual, institutional, and historiographical context. By offering the first comprehensive monographic study of Adam and his Gesta from its origins to its reception, From the North Sea to North America fills a long-standing desideratum in the field and contributes to ongoing debates about periodization, politics, and the spatial boundaries of the Middle Ages.
