Joel D. Anderson. Reimagining Christendom: Writing Iceland’s Bishops into the Roman Church 1200-1350.

As is frequently reiterated in Reimagining Christendom: Writing Iceland's Bishops into the Roman Church 1200-1350, the concept of Christendom is open to interpretation, debate, and reinterpretation, a fact key to understanding the relationship between periphery and centre in the medieval Latin Church.Anderson introduces his discussion of this dynamic of reinterpretation and reimagining with the example of Icelandic hagiographers grappling with the apparent flaws of their local saints, particularly the fact St. Jn gmundarson had remarried after the death of his first wife, which made him a bigamist in the eyes of the contemporary Church.Reimagining Christendom explores the ways in which the very levers of papal power were used to contrary purpose by Icelandic churchmen, to write their own conception of Christendom.Local practices, customs, and bishops were given dispensation and exception via the same textual tools that the papal court was using to centralize and consolidate its power in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.Through this argument, the book aims to nuance narratives about the institutionalization of the Church in the North and describe the agency employed by local churches and churchmen in their relationships to papal authority.Among the core strengths of Reimagining Christendom is its use of a variety of scholarly discourses and ideas to contextualize how Icelandic authors imagined a papacy which accommodated their needs on the periphery.Anderson's effective situating of his own arguments within the larger scope of medieval studies discourses is something often not effectively done in Old Norse studies and medieval Icelandic history.For example, in the introduction, the concept of "imagined community" and the work of Benedict Anderson provide a very useful frame to the discussion of medieval concepts of Christendom.Throughout the book, the extensive body of scholarship on the development and effects of textual authority on the medieval world is used to great effect in interpreting the limited sources for this same dynamic in thirteenth-and early fourteenth-century Iceland.Chapter 1 of Reimagining Christendom situates the ecclesiastical problems and conflicts of the Icelandic and Norwegian churches at the end of the twelfth century within the context of papal history, specifically the activities of Innocent III after his election in 1198.It closely examines the local Icelandic accounts of Pls saga and Sverris saga as well as the writings of Innocent III