Making the Profane Sacred in the Viking Age: Essays in Honour of Stefan Brink, Irene García Losquiño, Olof Sundqvist, and Declan Taggart. Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, 22. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020, xi, 332 pp.

This collection of essays opens with the editors’ biographical sketch of the honoree, Stefan Brink. Their original call for papers elicited an enthusiastic response, allowing them to select topics that accorded well with Brink’s research interests and could also be grouped around a multi-part theme. This results in an unusually coherent and focused collection of essays. The overall theme, summarized in the book’s title, Making the Profane Sacred, is ramified as 1) understanding sacredness, 2) sacredness and space, 3) the sacred and the text, 4) sacredness across contexts, and 5) afterlives of sacredness. (13); these also serve as section headings. The Viking world of the spirit and its internal dynamism are then rewardingly examined along coordinates of both space and time. The Introduction continues with summaries of the 19 essays that comprise the volume. A majority of these focus on broad topics rather than specific texts, sites, pseudo-historical moments, or phenomena, reflective of the senior status of most contributing scholars.