Dr Christian Cooijmans BA, MSc, PhD, FRHistS, FSA, FSAScot

My current research project focuses on the methods and motivations with which medieval chroniclers across the Low Countries recollected, represented, and repurposed the viking phenomenon during a formative period of politico-cultural memory. By analysing the extant primary evidence, it traces longstanding processes of textual transmission, whilst illuminating late medieval representations of prior medieval societies, their inhabitants, and the external pressures placed upon them. It thereby augments a limited body of knowledge on Scandinavian and otherwise ‘foreign’ influences in medieval Netherlandish historiography, and provides appropriate analogical perspectives on the (mis)appropriation of historical movements across modern-day Europe.

This ongoing research deals with the politico-economic exploits of vikings in and around the Frankish realm, which remain, to a considerable extent, obscured by the constraints of a fragmentary and biased corpus of (near-)contemporary evidence. My monograph on the topic, 'Monarchs and Hydrarchs', was published by Routledge in early 2020.