Swedish medieval marriage formation was a process, written down in the secular laws. However, it started to evolve because of the interaction with the medieval Catholic marriage doctrine, which focused on mutual words of consent. Although first the canon law of marriage, and then Lutheran marriage dogma influenced the Swedish development, the perception of marriage as a process, consisting of several legal acts and accompanied by property transfers, proved remarkably resilient. The pragmatic and rural character of Sweden contributed to this, despite pressure from canon and Roman law and attempts at bringing marriage formation under ecclesiastical control. Marrying by stages was in itself unremarkable in Europe, but the legal foundation and formality make medieval and sixteenth-century Sweden a unique case study.

An indispensable guide to how marriage acquired the status of a sacrament. This book analyzes in detail how medieval theologians explained the place of matrimony in the church and her law, and how the bitter debates of the sixteenth century elevated the doctrine to a dogma of the Catholic faith.

Much research has been done on medieval marriage in the last decades. However, few books have a pronouncedly comparative approach. This book discusses how much was regional and universal in medieval marriage law and practices in Europe. The sources used range from secular and canon law to court practice and from images to private correspondence. Articles discuss medieval and Reformation Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, and Sweden. Both marriage formation and marital property, two intertwined aspects, are considered in the articles. The book offers fresh evidence on the scope of regional variation tolerated by the Church, regional practices, and European trends. Contributors are James A. Brundage, Cecilia Cristellon, Trevor Dean, Charles Donahue, Jr., Caroline Dunn, Mia Korpiola, Jurgita Kunsmanaitė, Anu Lahtinen, Anthony Musson, Philip L. Reynolds, Kirsi Salonen, Silvana Seidel Menchi, and Monique Vleeschouwers-Van Melkebeek.

A Punishment for Each Criminal is the first in-depth analysis of how gender influenced Swedish medieval law. Christine Ekholst demonstrates how the law codes gradually and unevenly introduced women as possible perpetrators for all serious crimes. The laws reveal that legislators not only expected men and women to commit different types of crimes; they also punished men and women in different ways if they were convicted. The laws consistently stipulated different methods of executions for men and women; while men were hanged or broken on the wheel, women were buried alive, stoned, or burned at the stake. A Punishment for Each Criminal explores the background to the important legislative changes that took place when women were made personally responsible for their own crimes.

This project is an attempt to challenge the canonical gender concept while trying to specify what gender was in the medieval and early modern world. Despite the emphasis on individual, identity and difference that past research claims, much of this history still focuses on hierarchical or dichotomous paring of masculinity and femininity (or male and female). The emphasis on differences has been largely based on the research of such topics as premarital sex, religious deviance, rape and violence; these are topics that were, in the early modern society, criminal or at least easily marginalizing. The central focus of the book is to test, verify and challenge the methodology and use the concept(s) of gender specifically applicable to the period of great change and transition. The volume contains two theoretical sections supplemented by case-studies of gender through specific practices such as mysticism, witchcraft, crime, and legal behaviour. The first section, "Concepts", analyzes certain useful notions, such as patriarchy and morality. The second section, "Identities", seeks to deepen this analysis into the studies of female identities in various situations, cultures and dimensions and to show the fluidity and flexibility of what is called femininity nowadays. The third part, "Practises", seeks to rethink the bigger narratives through the case-studies coming from Northern Europe to see how conventional ideas of gender did not work in this particular region. The case studies also challenge the established narratives in such well-research historiographies as witchcraft and sexual offences and at the same time suggest new insights for the developing fields of study, such as history of homicide.

Since 1971, the International Congress for Neo-Latin Studies has been organised every three years in various cities in Europe and North America. In August 2009, Uppsala in Sweden was the venue of the fourteenth Neo-Latin conference, held by the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies. The proceedings of the Uppsala conference have been collected in this volume under the motto “Litteras et artes nobis traditas excolere – Reception and Innovation”. Ninety-nine individual and five plenary papers spanning the period from the Renaissance to the present offer a variety of themes covering a range of genres such as history, literature, philology, art history, and religion. The contributions will be of relevance not only for scholarly readers, but also for an interested non-professional audience.

Courage and Grief illuminates in a nuanced fashion Sweden’s involvement in Europe’s destructive Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). Focusing on the various roles women performed in the bloody and extended conflict, Mary Elizabeth Ailes analyzes how methods of warfare and Swedish society were changing in profound ways. This study considers the experiences of unmarried camp followers and officers’ wives as well as peasant women who remained in the countryside during times of conflict and upheaval. Women contributed to the war effort in a variety of ways. On campaign they provided support services to armies in the field. On the home front they helped to minimize disruptions incurred within their frayed communities. As increasing numbers of men left to fight overseas, women took over local economic activities and defended their families’ interests. Such activities significantly altered the fabric of Swedish society. Examining women’s wartime experiences in the Thirty Years’ War enhances our understanding of women’s roles in society, the nature of female power and authority, and the opportunities and hardships that warfare brought to women’s lives.

Based on legislation and legal practice from the period c. 1250-1600 the book takes issue with the most important viewpoints in earlier research by early modernists: that the Reformation represented a watershed in a development characterized by greater criminalisation of sexual acts, increase in the severity of sentences and deterioration of the position of women. According to this study, in principle all or mostly all factors were already in place in the Middle Ages. In Norwegian historiography the period investigated is characterized by paucity of sources, and the period has tended to fall between two stools, respectively the medievalist and the early modernist. The ambition of this book has been to bridge the gap.

A strict definition of kinship – a canonical one – was in introduced in to the Nordic medieval legislation. This replaced a looser definition. According to a canonical definition of kinship – constructed after the Church’s incest prohibitions, you were obligated towards all your blood-relatives. This doctrine applies where: 1) The kin group acted as a legal person towards a third party in cases about paying of wergeld, and where the kinsmen collectively took an oath. 2) Rights and obligations between the kindred regulated land transactions either by inheritance, donations or sale. Here the obligations were at their widest. The moral requirement for love and cohesiveness was strengthened by more substantial rules to ensure, that land was not transferred at the expense of kinsmen.

Demonic possession was a spiritual state that often had physical symptoms; however, in Demonic Possession and Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe, Sari Katajala-Peltomaa argues that demonic possession was a social phenomenon which should be understood with regard to the community and culture. She focuses on significant case studies from canonization processes (c. 1240-1450) which show how each set of sources formed its own specific context, in which demonic presence derived from different motivations, reasonings, and methods of categorization. The chosen perspective is that of lived religion, which is both a thematic approach and a methodology: a focus on rituals, symbols, and gestures, as well as sensitivity to nuances and careful contextualizing of the cases are constitutive elements of the argumentation. The analysis contests the hierarchy between the 'learned' and the 'popular' within religion, as well as the existence of a strict polarity between individual and collective religious participation. Demonic presence disclosed negotiations over authority and agency; it shows how the personal affected the communal, and vice versa, and how they were eventually transformed into discourses and institutions of the Church; that is, definitions of the miraculous and the diabolical. Geographically, the volume covers Western Europe, comparing Northern and Southern material and customs. The structure follows the logic of the phenomenon, beginning with the background reasons offered as a cause of demonic possession, continuing with communities' responses and emotions, including construction of sacred caregiving methods. Finally, the ways in which demonic presence contributed to wider societal debates in the fields of politics and spirituality are discussed. Alterity and inversion of identity, gender, and various forms of corporeality and the interplay between the sacred and diabolical are themes that run all through the volume.