Anders Winroth Lecture: “From Ritual to Legal Complexity: Papal Pardon in the Middle Ages”

Anders Winroth, Professor of History at Yale University, specializes in the history of medieval Europe, especially religious, intellectual, and legal history as well as the Viking Age. His book, The Making of Gratian’s Decretum, won Yale’s Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication and the John Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America. In 2003 he was named a MacArthur Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. His new book, The Conversion of Scandinavia: Vikings, Merchants, and Missionaries in the Remaking of Northern Europe (2011), argues for a radically new interpretation of the conversion of Scandinavia from paganism to Christianity in the early Middle Ages.