, ed. Tore Iversen, John Ragnar Myking, and Stefan Sonderegger. The Northern World, 89. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2020, xii, 375 pp.

Following two previous volumes on peasants’ relationship to land control, governmental structures, and self-determination resulting from an international project funded by the Norwegian Research Council (2004‒2007), this collection of essays poses a challenge to once prevalent historiographical interpretations of a supposed Scandinavian – and particularly Norwegian – condition, in which agricultural laborers in the northern periphery purportedly enjoyed greater degrees of land ownership, control of resources, and political capital within the local milieu than their contemporaries to the South. To that end, the editors have developed a geographical, more narrowly a topographical and environmental, framework for a comparison between Norway and the West Norse areas of settlement (with a smaller role played by Denmark and Sweden when possible), on the one hand, and the Eastern Alpine region (primarily Tyrol and Switzerland with additional counterexamples in Lower Austria, southern Germany, and elsewhere in Central Europe), on the other. After an introductory chapter outlining the historiographical background and scope of the project, the first part spans three chapters on comparative local examinations of slavery and degrees of freedom, types of land ownership and control, and forms of local political participation, followed by a conclusion; the second offers four chapters on the national historiographical traditions challenged by the comparative studies in the first part and subsequently revised on a local basis here, namely in Norway, Tyrol, various regions of Germany, and Switzerland. (On an organizational note, the table of contents lists four ‘parts,’ the first of which contains only the introduction, while the fourth comprises what are strangely labelled appendices.)