Ontologies of Titles: Office-Person Relationships and Social Taxonomies in 13th-Century Norway and Iceland

More than mere labels, medieval titles strongly defined the identities of the persons or groups who bore them. Ontologies of Titles questions modern assumptions that guide how historians frame social titles; it shows that Norse titles often were indifferent to boundaries between individual and common, person and office. Drawing on a wide range of sources, the book explores how titles were shaped by political practice, textual production, and the conflicting aprioris governing the categorization of beings. It demonstrates how social titles alternated between signaling inherent personal qualities and abstract categories, thus revealing how language operated across multiple ontological registers in structuring social order.