The Rituals of Text and the Boundaries of Historiography — A Study of Four Swedish Historical Works from the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

My research focuses on how writers of the 15th and 16th centuries dealt with ritualized phenomena in relation to questions of legitimacy. Previous research suggests that depictions of such phenomena, for instance funerals, could be significant when authors strove to legitimize or delegitimize various power holders, such as kings and bishops. Our knowledge of how such depictions were constructed in regard to the Swedish historiography of the 15th and 16th centuries is, however, limited. How did writers go about to make such depictions convey certain meanings in relation to notions of legitimacy? And how did different political and literary contexts shape such depictions?

An analysis of how writers of the age constructed their depictions of ritualized phenomena can also shed light on a larger question, namely how the chroniclers and historians made use of their sources and how bound they were by these sources. Generally speaking, the historiography of the 15th and 16th centuries was imbued by the political views of the writer or the commissioner of the work in question. But to what extent could they adapt their depictions of the past along the lines of their political views? How did they deal with information in the sources that did not correspond to their interests? In essence, how adaptable was the past, when it was used as a weapon of sorts in the volatile political situation that dominated Sweden for much of the 15th and 16th centuries?