Professor Nora Berend: Stephen I, the First Christian King of Hungary

We are pleased to invite you to the book launch of Professor Nora Berend’s recently published monograph in which she investigates entangled processes of medieval and modern myth-making. The book traces uses of the past in pre-World War II nationalism, the Soviet bloc period, and contemporary populism in Hungary.

About the book:

Stephen I, Hungary’s first Christian king (reigned 997-1038) has been celebrated as the founder of the Hungarian state and church. Despite the scarcity of medieval sources, and consequent limitations on historical knowledge, he has had a central importance in narratives of Hungarian history and national identity. This book argues that instead of conceptualizing modern political medievalism separately as an ‘abuse’ of history, we must investigate history’s very fabric, because cultural memory is woven into the production of the medieval sources. Medieval myth-making served as a firm basis for centuries of further elaboration and reinterpretation, both in historiography and in political legitimizing strategies. In many ways we cannot reach the ‘real’ Stephen, but we can do much more to understand the shaping of his myths. The author traces the origin of crucial stories around Stephen, contextualizing both the invention of early narratives and their later use. A challenger to Stephen’s rule who may be a medieval literary invention became the protagonist of a rock opera in 1983, also standing in for Imre Nagy, a key figure of the 1956 revolution; moreover, he was reinvented as the embodiment of true Hungarian identity. The alleged right hand relic was ‘discovered’ to provide added legitimacy for Hungary’s kings and then became a protagonist of the entanglement of Church and state. A medieval crown was invested with supernatural status, before turning into a national symbol. This book analyses the often seamless flow that has turned medieval myth into modern history, showing that politicisation was not a modern addition, but a determinant factor from the start.

About the author:

Nora Berend is Professor of European History at the University of Cambridge. Educated in Budapest, Paris, and New York, she held a Junior Research Fellowship at Cambridge, a Humboldt Fellowship at Mannheim, and was an invited Fellow at the K. Hamburger Kolleg Bochum. She was visiting professor at EHESS (Paris), Doshisha (Kyoto), Mannheim and Stockholm, Professor II at NTNU, Trondheim, Norway, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Stockholm. Her research interests encompass the treatment of religious minorities, religious and cultural interaction, the process of Christianization, the formation of identity, and the creation of historical myths. Her publications include At the Gate of Christendom: Jews, Muslims and ‘pagans’ in medieval Hungary (c.1000 – c. 1300) (2001), for which she received the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone prize and the American Association for the Study of Hungarian History’s Biennial Book Prize; ed., Christianization and the rise of Christian monarchy: Central Europe, Scandinavia and Rus’ c. 950 – c. 1200 (2007); ed., The expansion of Central Europe in the Middle Ages (2013); co-authored with Przemysław Urbańczyk and Przemysław Wiszewski, Central Europe in the High Middle Ages, c. 900 – c.1300 (2013).
This book launch is part of the Engelsberg Applied History Programme:

This event will be followed by a drinks reception.

Host or Publisher Centre for Geopolitics