The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, written by a missionary priest in the early thirteenth century to record the history of the crusades to Livonia and Estonia in around 1186-1227, offers one of the most vivid examples of the early thirteenth century crusading ideology in practice. Step by step, it has become one of the most widely read and acknowledged frontier crusading and missionary chronicles. Henry's chronicle offers many opportunities to test and broaden the new approaches and key concepts brought along by recent developments in medieval studies, including the new pluralist definition of crusading and the relationship between the peripheries and core areas of Europe.

While recent years have produced a significant amount of new research into Henry of Livonia, much of it has been limited to particular historical traditions and languages. A key objective of this book, therefore, is to synthesise the current state of research for the international scholarly audience. The volume provides a multi-sided and multi-disciplinary companion to the chronicle, and is divided into three parts. The first part, 'Representations,' brings into focus the imaginary sphere of the chronicle - the various images brought into existence by the amalgamation of crusading and missionary ideology and the frontier experience. This is followed by studies on 'Practices,' which examines the chronicle's reflections of the diplomatic, religious, and military practices of the christianisation and colonisation processes in medieval Livonia. The volume concludes with a section on the 'Appropriations,' which maps the reception history of the chronicle: the dynamics of the medieval, early modern and modern national uses and abuses of the text.

Contents: Preface; Introduction: Henry of Livonia, the writer and his chronicle, James A. Brundage; Part I Representations: Henry of Livonia and the ideology of crusading, Christopher Tyerman; Sacred history, profane history: uses of the Bible in the Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, Jaan Undusk; Henricus the ethnographer: reflections on ethnicity in the Chronicle of Livonia, Jüri Kivimäe; Henry the interpreter: language, orality and communication in the 13th-century Livonian mission, Alan V. Murray; Martyrs and miracles: depicting death in the Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, Marek Tamm; Henry of Livonia on woods and wilderness, Torben Kjersgaard Nielsen; 'Verbis non verberibus'; the representation of sermons in the Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, Carsten Selch Jensen. Part II Practices: Riga and Rome: Henry of Livonia and the papal curia, Iben Fonnesberg-Schmidt; The notion of a missionary theatre: the ludus magnus of Henry of Livonia's Chronicle, Nils Holger Petersen; Bigger and better: arms race and change in war technology in the Baltic in the early 13th century, Kurt Villads Jensen; Mechanical artillery and warfare in the Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, Ain Mäesalu; An archaeological reading of the Chronicle of Henry of Livonia: events, traces, contexts and interpretations, Valter Lang and Heiki Valk; Ösel and the Danish kingdom: re-visiting Henry's Chronicle and the archaeological evidence, Marika Mägi. Part III Appropriations: The use and uselessness of the Chronicle of Henry of Livonia in the Middle Ages, Anti Selart; The Chronicon Livoniae in early modern scholarship: from receptions to the Gruber edition of 1740, Stefan Donecker; Henry's Chronicle on the service of historical thought: editors and editions, Tiina Kala; The chronicler and the modern world: Henry of Livonia and the Baltic crusades in the Enlightenment and national traditions, Linda Kaljundi (in collaboration with Kaspars Klavins); Henry of Livonia: an international bibliography, Marek Tamm; Index.