2025/01/01 by Cooijmans, Christian · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Medieval Literature and History #Globalization and political ideologies #Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies
paper · doi:10.17613/d51xz-p4w68
This paper offers an overview and analysis of Dorestad's depiction between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, drawing on a broad-ranging regional corpus of chronicles, hagiographies, and associated textual accounts. In doing so, it considers the narrative significance that the settlement continued to hold during a period in which institutions across the Low Countries had begun to increasingly consider and codify their own collective histories and memories. Where these written records had initially sought to draw on the testimony of contemporaneous annals, the memory and legacy of the emporium is seen to have become increasingly apocryphal over time, with historians building upon each other's work, collating and changing details, and eventually turning Dorestad into an abstraction of mythical proportions. Inbound vikings are seen to feature prominently throughout this daisy-chain of narrative embellishment, as their arrival continued to spell the end for Dorestad, no matter the guise in which it appears.