Change search
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf
Kungamakten och lagen: En jämförelse mellan Danmark, Norge och Sverige under högmedeltiden
Stockholm University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of History.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-0220-3947
2014 (Swedish)Doctoral thesis, monograph (Other academic)Alternative title
Kingship and Law : A Comparison between Denmark, Norway, and Sweden in the High Middle Ages (English)
Abstract [en]

The dissertation is a comparative study of the expansion of law-regulated royal power in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden c. 1150–1350. The aim is to examine how the king’s judicial and military authority and functions, and their effect on the power position of the regional legal assembly and the church, is expressed and how it changed over time in the extant law material. The starting point is the pan-European consolidation of royal power in the High Middle Ages, and the dissertation considers international research on the medieval state formation process and its driving forces. The processual concepts of centralization, institutionalization, hierarchization, and territorialization occupy a central place in the analysis.

Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish laws all reflect a significant increase in royal power. A growing number of societal functions were vested in the increasingly institutionalized kingship, and there was a growth in its power resources. At the same time, it is possible to identify crucial inter-Scandinavian differences. A main finding is that the law-regulated royal power, in most respects, was strongest in Norway and weakest in Sweden. Another important conclusion is that executive royal power first emerged after the judicial and also legislative power had already to a large extent come under royal control.

It is demonstrated that Scandinavian kingship in the High Middle Ages was characterized by increasingly centralized and institutionalized territorially based power, with a greater monopoly on the use of legitimate force, and thereby strengthened the ongoing state formation process. The expansion of law-regulated royal power primarily concerned the judicial sphere and only secondarily the military and fiscal spheres. That state formation was driven by judicial development rather than militarization is also shown by the fact that Norway, despite having the least professionalized and resource-demanding armed forces, was the Scandinavian country with the most centralized and institutionalized royal power.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Stockholm: Historiska institutionen, Stockholms universitet , 2014. , p. 458
Keywords [en]
Kingship, medieval Scandinavia, state formation, legal history, constitutional history, comparative method
National Category
History
Research subject
History
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:su:diva-106620ISBN: 978-91-7447-936-2 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:su-106620DiVA, id: diva2:737397
Public defence
2014-09-25, hörsal 8, hus D, Universitetsvägen 10 D, 13:00 (Swedish)
Opponent
Supervisors
Available from: 2014-09-03 Created: 2014-08-12 Last updated: 2022-02-23Bibliographically approved

Open Access in DiVA

No full text in DiVA

Authority records

Charpentier Ljungqvist, Fredrik

Search in DiVA

By author/editor
Charpentier Ljungqvist, Fredrik
By organisation
Department of History
History

Search outside of DiVA

GoogleGoogle Scholar

isbn
urn-nbn

Altmetric score

isbn
urn-nbn
Total: 2665 hits
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf