Envisioning North from a Premodern Perspective

Abstract

In The Making of Europe, the medieval historian Robert Bartlett argues that ‘Europe is both a region and an idea’. The same can be said of the North. The North is both a geographical region and an imaginative concept that varies, transforms, and coheres diachronically and synchronically according to the perspective adopted. Thus, North is a cardinal direction, but more importantly it is ‘an overriding metaphor, a kind of culturally defined and maintained structuring principle that helps — literally like the compass itself - to orient ourselves in the world’.