Mission before Colonization. Towards a non-lachrymose history of religious contact in Greenland and Sápmi, 1000-1700

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Cordelia Heß
• Subject Area: Medieval History ; Prehistory and World Archaeology
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 454766761

The colonies in the Arctic and Fennoscandic regions are marginalized in several regards: they are basically absent from both research and political debates regarding postcolonial struggles, and their early history is absent from research about mission and cultural contacts. Contact between the Arctic and Fennoscandic peoples and Christian settlers and traders had a history that spanned several centuries before missionaries became the agents of European expansionism. Nonetheless, these encounters are inevitably interpreted as the prehistory of colonial domination, and never as part of a political andreligious strategy consciously adopted by indigenous people and analogous to, for example, the Christianization of the Scandinavian kings – in which conversion and cultural contact are portrayed as mutually beneficiary and positiveprocesses. This appears to be a projection coloured by an ex post perspective of accomplished colonization. It also assumes a form of preordained European dominance and superiority, even at the time of the earliest encounters. This project will rigorously challenge these assumptions by performing re-readings of the available written and material sources. The objective of this project is three-fold: first, to rewrite the history of medieval Northern religious and cultural contacts in comparison to other processes of conversion, a history which neither reproduces the lachrymose narrative nor falls into apologetics for Northern colonialism as a “benevolent” form of domination and exploitation. Second, to reduce the anachronistic projection of later developments onto religious contact in earlier centuries by integrating the previous centuries of largely peaceful mutual contact, or lack thereof, into the overall history of Nordic colonialism. Key to the study of the medieval roots of modern colonialism is detaching religiouscontact and missionizing from colonization and, by consequence, developing a different periodization for each of them. Third, on a methodological level, the innovative aim of this project lies in the chronological and geographical integration of the history of medievalChristianization and colonization in the Arctic and Fennoscandia into post-colonial studies theory, by means of the application of historical semantics as an integrative method for written and material sources. At the same time, the application of postcolonial terminology and concepts as well as of interdisciplinary approaches, as known from Viking and Jewish studies, will be critically tested for the medieval contacts between Christians and indigenous peoples in Greenland and Sápmi.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Denmark
• Cooperation Partner: Dr. Christian Koch Madsen