In The Introduction to this book, I indicated that its aim was to investigate Adam of Bremen’s ideas concerning the Christianization of Europe’s northern territories as articulated through his account in the Gesta Hammaburgensis. As I then stated, this approach is in many ways novel in its treatment of the text. When considering the impact his account has had on the modern understanding not only of the Christianization process but also of the pre-conversion Slavic and Scandinavian religious landscapes, one can recognize the importance of the results that this new approach enables. Two reflections were made as the starting points for this analysis. The first was that Adam’s main objective was to explore the theme of the legatio gentium, emphasizing its origins and the vicissitudes it had suffered up to the current time. He did this not only as a memorializing undertaking, but also with the aim of reinvigorating it—in an ecclesiastical and political sense—at a time when, owing to Adalbert’s disastrous rule, the archbishopric had experienced a very troubling period. The second reflection was that no matter how awkward or distorted Adam’s narrative might appear to modern readers, the idea that he either simply did not want to understand complex cultural expressions or, even worse, deliberately manipulated his narrative, can never sufficiently explain why he wrote what he did in the way that he did. With these two premises in mind, my analysis looked for the conceptual elements that guided Adam’s specific construction of history.

Let us return for a moment to the schematic illustration of the process through which a representation (in this case, a narrative) is formed (Figure 1). Here we see that experience, its perception, the selection of material, and the constraints of literary rules, all combine to mould this representation. In the chapters that followed, I tried, using different passages from the Gesta, to point to the influence of these elements in Adam’s constructed narrative, keeping in mind that they result from his concepts or conceptions (as explained by Hans-Werner Goetz). I identified the complex interplay of these elements and how Adam stresses different aspects of the construction process at different times.