Church and nation: The discourse on authority in Ericus Olai’s Chronica regni Gothorum (c. 1471)

Tags

Christianity, Early Modern, Ecclesiastical History, ERICUS OLAI, FIFTEENTH CENTURY, GOTHS KINGDOM CHRONICLE/CHRONICA REGNI GOTHORUM, Historiography, Late Middle Ages, Manuscripts and Palaeography, Politics, Renaissance, SIXTEENTH CENTURY, Social History, Sweden

Bjorn Tjällén

PhD Dissertation, Stockholm University (2007)

The Chronica regni Gothorum is the first Latin national history of Sweden. Completed after 1471 by a canon of Uppsala, Ericus Olai, it testifies to the articulation at the Swedish arch see of the dominant political issues of the day: the status of the Swedish realm in the union with Denmark-Norway, and the relations between the king, aristocracy and ecclesiastical leadership. This thesis analyses the discourse on authority in the Chronica. It investigates the normative basis of Ericus’s treatment of contemporary political issues as a source for the social-political outlooks of Sweden’s ecclesiastical power elite, a group not previously studied in this respect. In particular, it argues for the importance of two prescriptive assumptions on social order, which lie at the heart of the authority discourse in the Chronica: God divided the world into self-governing peoples and realms, and He instituted the lay and clerical orders as parallel hierarchies of societal authority.

Click here to read this thesis from Stockholm University

(via Medievalists)