This chapter collects the historical threads about the economic growth of the two Iberian nations. From a disappointing nineteenth century, during which they fell behind the rest of Europe, and the conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century, the two nations quickly caught up from the 1950s. Growth was mostly extensive and pulled by physical capital accumulation, with small contributions from human capital or productivity. The Iberian divergence from its European peers has often been blamed on natural endowments, modest domestic markets and savings, as well as on second-nature geography (market access). However, this volume shows that all of these were endogenous to the growth itself, which requires looking for deeper explanations. Institutions and the political equilibria that underpin them loom large here. After a century of fragile liberal monarchies and radical republican regimes, the two nations stood out for their long authoritarian regimes. Inward-looking economic policies promoted by the dictators favoured domestic incumbents but harmed the growth potential of the two countries. Only their gradual reopening from the 1950s unleashed this potential. Nevertheless, the gains from growth have not been equally distributed and convergence stalled in the new millennium, with the adoption of the Euro.

The Biskupa sögur (sagas of bishops) deal with the lives of six medieval Icelandic bishops, covering the history of Iceland’s two bishoprics, Skálholt and Hólar, from the mid eleventh century to the fourteenth century. They are important sources for Icelandic church history and the lives of individual bishops, three of whom were venerated as saints. This chapter provides a history of the genre, surveying texts about the saints Þorlákr Þórhallsson, Jón Ögmundsson and Guðmundr Arason, the chronicle Hungrvaka, which records the lives of the five bishops who preceded St Þorlákr, the sagas of three other bishops, Páls saga, Árna saga Þorlákssonar and Lárentíus saga Kálfssonar, and two þættir, Ísleifs þáttr and Jóns þáttr Halldórssonar. This genre has received less scholarly attention than some other genres of Icelandic literature, but this chapter argues that the sagas have much to offer historians and literary scholars. It examines the role of miracle-stories within the sagas and considers what these texts can tell us about such questions as the relationship between memory and literacy in medieval Iceland, the expression of emotion, masculinity, sexuality and celibacy.

Around 1500 Spain and Portugal were among the most affluent nations in the world, and had income levels that were similar to those of other Western European countries. Three hundred years later the Iberian economies had lost their economic supremacy and fell behind all the main European powers. When did the first two global empires in history lose their hegemony to become secondary actors? What were the foundations of the collapse that explains the divergence from north-western Europe? This chapter addresses these issues and describes what is now known about the long-term trends of Iberian economies between 1500 and 1800.

This chapter describes the prevalence of prosimetrum – the alternation of narrative prose and skaldic verse – in the Íslendingasögur, with a brief consideration of prosimetrum in konungasögur and samtíðarsögur. A distinction is introduced between verses which are quoted as the dialogue of characters and those which appear to corroborate the narrative prose; it is explained that this distinction is established through the way the verses are incorporated in the prose, and is not inherent in the stanzas themselves. The aesthetic effects of verses representing dialogue in saga prose – additional content, the direct perspective and apparent voice of a character, control of narrative pace and ornamentation – are set out. The plausibility or otherwise of the impromptu recitation of skaldic verse is discussed, and a contrast drawn between the elaborate artificiality of skaldic verse and the ostensible simplicity of saga prose. The distinction between the two kinds of verse use is then problematized. A discussion of how and why the prose and verse first came together comes next, with speculation about how authors constructed their prosimetrical sagas and the literary effects achieved.

Economic historians have placed commercialization at the centre of Europe’s early modern capitalism, emphasizing the importance of domestic and international trade, shipbuilding and concomitant manufactures, the financial sector, and urbanization. As the Iberian polities extended geographically to Africa, Asia and the Americas during the early modern period, trade, whether domestic, international or colonial, had a critical effect upon economic development. However, the economic impact of colonial expansion was uneven across Iberia. Iberia commercial exchange associated with the overseas empires produced surprisingly few backward and forward linkages in the European national economies. The question this chapter seeks to address is thus to what extent and how Iberian trade, especially colonial trade, supported or hindered economic development in the early modern period.

By the time Christianity reached Iceland, saints’ lives were already a vast and enormously popular genre of literature well-established across the medieval Christian world. This chapter discusses how Icelandic writers engaged with this genre, concentrating especially on translated saints’ lives in Old Norse. While rooted in and responding to the particular conditions of Icelandic society, these vernacular adaptations and engagements with Latin Christian culture also transported the readers and writers of Old Norse-Icelandic literature far beyond their immediate environs. Beginning with the earliest examples of saints’ lives from the twelfth century, this chapter outlines how the genre developed over time from relative simplicity to a more complex and rhetorically accomplished approach. It describes how saints’ lives intersected with other forms of literature being written in medieval Iceland, including romance and the family sagas, and addresses categories of saint’s life which have received less critical attention: the Marian corpus, the lives of virgin martyrs and Low German translations into Old Norse-Icelandic.

This chapter provides a chronological review of critical responses to Old Norse-Icelandic literature. The ‘book-prose vs free-prose’ debate is the starting-point for this overview, which then focuses on modern scholarship on sagas. The approach of the Icelandic school is discussed, followed by consideration of theoretical issues such as orality, structuralism, anthropological methods and the influence of non-Icelandic literary forms. Next come post-structuralism and narratology. The diversity of theoretical approaches which grew up towards the end of the twentieth century is documented, including post-colonialism and polysystem theory. Long-held generic distinctions are reviewed, and the development of gender studies with regard to Old Norse is described. Recent developments in the study of orality in prose and poetry are discussed, as are theoretical topics such as memory studies and the role of the paranormal. The chapter concludes with an account of the diversity of critical approaches to Old Norse-Icelandic literature and explains the need to employ integrated theories bringing in research from a number of disciplines, including archaeology, psychoanalysis and sociology.

This chapter uses archaeological theory to enrich readings of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, exploring human interactions with the physical world during the Viking Age. The focus is on artefacts, buildings and constructed places in the landscape. The chapter begins with a survey of Viking Age material culture studies, emphasizing the move beyond data collection to ways of probing meaning and highlighting new areas of archaeological research and theory, including landscape archaeology, geophysics and laboratory-based techniques such as isotopic analysis. Theories of landscape and the social significance of the physical world are discussed, and also the way materials, methods of construction, and the form and decoration of material culture carry meaning. The role of diaspora studies is also explored. The chapter continues with an analysis of three particular kinds of object – swords, brooches and combs – and moves on to consider acts of transformation and the magic associated with objects, especially hoards and ritual deposition. There are sections on the construction of Viking Age buildings, ships and mounds and what they can tell us about life in the Viking Age.

The subject of this chapter is rímur (rhymes), long narrative poems intended to be delivered orally, which were the most important secular poetic genre in Iceland from the late Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century. The chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the genre, beginning with a brief introduction to the rímur and the terminology used to describe them, before focusing in detail on their metrical form and linguistic features. It then discusses the relationship of the rímur with their different kinds of source material, since almost all are based on pre-existing narratives, particularly the riddarasögur and fornaldarsögur. It surveys what is known of the poems’ authorship, performance and dating, as well as describing the manuscripts in which they are preserved. Finally, it outlines the critical and editorial history of the rímur, arguing that their unusual linguistic and metrical features, their long-lasting popularity and the significance of their interactions with other genres of Old Norse-Icelandic literature means they deserve more scholarly attention than they have typically received.

This chapter discusses the interactions between Latin learning and Old Norse-Icelandic vernacular literature between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. Beginning with the arrival of Latin textual culture in Iceland with the introduction of Christianity, it describes how oral literary culture was transformed by contact with these new forms of learning. It takes as case-studies manuscripts which reveal the influence of learned material, first considering the relationship between Ari’s Íslendingabók and the study of computus, chronology and geographical learning, and then discussing encyclopaedic handbooks attributed to two lawmen, Sturla Þórðarson’s Resensbók and Haukr Erlendsson’s Hauksbók. To explore the interaction between Latin learning and skaldic poetry, it then focuses on Codex Wormianus, a compilation of vernacular grammatical literature and skaldic poetics. It argues that skaldic verse was reconciled with Christian textual culture by functioning in vernacular grammatical literature in the same way as classical verse did in Latin culture, and analyses an example from the Third Grammatical Treatise to show how a skaldic stanza could be used in this way.

This chapter covers the history of banking in the Iberian Peninsula from the early nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The narrative provides a complete, albeit brief, historical overview of how the financial structures of the two countries have evolved. It also offers a comparative perspective of the two financial systems, pointing out to their similarities and their differences. The first part of the chapter describes the formation of the Portuguese and the Spanish banking systems. Special attention is given to the main changes that took place since their early beginnings to the consolidation and modernization of the banking structure in both countries. The second part traces the history of the two Iberian central banks: the Bank of Portugal and the Bank of Spain. The last section compares the banking structure and development of the two Iberian nations, and brings out their similarities and differences. First the attention is focused on comparing the main features of the Portuguese and Spanish private commercial and investment institutions. The chapter finishes with a brief evaluation of the historical role played by the Bank of Portugal and the Bank of Spain.