Ontologies of Titles: Office-Person Relationships and Social Taxonomies in 13th-Century Norway and Iceland

More than mere labels, medieval titles strongly defined the identities of the persons or groups who bore them. Ontologies of Titles questions modern assumptions that guide how historians frame social titles; it shows that Norse titles often were indifferent to boundaries between individual and common, person and office.
Drawing on a wide range of sources, the book explores how titles were shaped by political practice, textual production, and the conflicting aprioris governing the categoriza...