Clas Tollin on 12th Century Land Ownership

i-cdb392a00b6dcb88d53c1e3415315b40-Alvastra.jpg
The former Cistercian abbey of Alvastra in 1639.

My brother in arms against pomo nonsense, human/cultural geographer Clas Tollin, has put half the manuscript of his forthcoming book on-line beforehand (fully illustrated, in Swedish). The title is Storgårdar, egenkyrkor och sockenbildning i Omberg-Tåkernområdet under äldre medeltid, "Manorial farms, private churches and the genesis of parishes in the Omberg-Tåkern area in the Early Middle Ages". (These are the Swedish Early Middle Ages, dating from about AD 1100 to 1250.) Hugely useful to me as I'm doing fieldwork and writing about the period up to AD 1000 in that very area, and likely to be interesting to many others too.

Via LL.

[More blog entries about , , , , , , ; , , , , .]

More like this

I really enjoyed my work yesterday. The forenoon saw me in the stores of the Museum of National Antiquities looking through Otto Frödin's uncatalogued finds from the "SverkersgÃ¥rden" site near Alvastra monastery. Not only did I find all the elusive 1st Millennium stuff that's mentioned in the…
Högby near Mjölby in Ãstergötland is a magical place because of a serious lack of historical sensitivity. In 1876 (which is really late as these things go in Sweden) the locals demolished their little 12th century church and built a new bigger one a mile to the south. This meant that the parish…
Polyhedrical weight. 9/10th century. Photograph Tobias Bondesson. (Martin here, posting from the hostel of Norsholm on the Göta canal, using my handheld and the cell phone network. To get the post on-line, my dear scibling Janet has kindly agreed to act as go-between.) Coin struck for Heinrich…
[More about archaeology, metaldetecting; arkeologi, metallsökare, Uppsala.] The view from my second investigation area. The great barrows were erected about AD 600. I spent Tuesday and Wednesday metal-detecting for my buddy John Ljungkvist on some of the most storied soil in Sweden: Old Uppsala.…

1. Clas Tollin defended his PhD in 1999. Whatever the published manuscript is the half of, it is not his PhD. Read his published PhD: Tollin, C. 1999. Rågångar, gränshallar och ägoområden : rekonstruktion av fastighetsstruktur och bebyggelseutveckling i mellersta Småland under äldre medeltid. Diss. Stockholm.

2. The Swedish word Kulturgeografi rightly translates Human Geography. The English "Cultural geography" is usually translated to Kulturens geografi or a little bit more clumsy Kulturell geografi. Clas Tollin is hardly a Cultural Geographer. I suspect Martin with his strict hate against everything that has a slight smell of post-modernism would not count the majority of Cultural Geographers as "brothers in arms". And I also guess Clas do not. Read here what the UGU commission on the cultural appraoch in geography emphasises:

"The Commission 'Cultural Approach in Geography' has contributed substantially to the critical analysis of geographical representations of cultural realities over the last decades. Foci of interest have been in particular: the interrelation of culture, region and space the cultural approach in the different sub-disciplines of geography spatial aspects of cultural processes (modernization, formation of regional identification, social exclusion, policies of preservation etc.)"

By Mats Widgren (not verified) on 23 Apr 2008 #permalink

Wow! What eyecandy!

By Christina (not verified) on 23 Apr 2008 #permalink

Mats, 1: Silly me, I knew that Clas had published a thesis. But since this new work was advertise3d on SLU's web site as a "half-way seminar", and as it was to have an "opponent", I thought maybe the earlier thesis had been for a fil.lic.

2. Aha, so "cultural geography" is actually pomo meta-geography. Good to know.

Christina, yeah, early maps are great!

Martin. Let me just hastily add that a strong group of cultural geographers do very good empirical and theoretical work. Don Mitchell e.g. writes sharply on landscapes from a materialist viewpoint and often publishes in cultural geography journals. His story of strawberry eating on his parents terrace and the hidden labour behind the beatiful Californian landscape is a classic. I f I remember correctly it is in: "California Living, California Dying: Dead Labor and the Political Economy of Landscape," in K. Anderson, S. Pile, and N. Thrift (eds.), Handbook of Cultural Geography (London: Sage, 2003), 233-248

By Mats Widgren (not verified) on 24 Apr 2008 #permalink