The Image of the Baltic: A Festschrift for Nils Blomkvist

When the time-honored leader of the Baltic Rim seminar, Professor Nils Blomkvist, had his 65th birthday in 2008 a "celebration conference" under the title "The Image of the Baltic – a Thousand-Years’ Perspective" was arranged within the permanent Baltic Rim seminar series at Gotland University. Consequently, many of his old scholarly friends from the Baltic Rim fields of study – and some new ones – had gathered in order to highlight this chronological landmark and to discuss the role of images in the historical disciplines. The participants came from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Poland, Germany, Denmark and Sweden, not to mention the many Gotlanders among the Swedes. In 2010 Nils Blomkvist finally retired from his professorship in Medieval History at Gotland University.
Now a selection of the papers that were presented at the Baltic Rim seminar have been converted into a Festschrift, including Nils Blomkvist’s own lecture "Peter of Dacia and the Urban Revolution", which he gave at the closure of the conference. This anthology is his colleagues’ way of honoring him.