In thirteenth-century Sweden, kings began referring to Roman law and its concept of treason to legitimize their use of political violence in executing magnates who rebelled against them or otherwise became their political enemies. Kings implemented a strategy of executions to deter powerful noblemen from reaching too high and challenging the king’s position, or from encroaching on monarchical authority. Public executions and political murders of noblemen in the Scandinavian kingdoms (Sweden and Norway) during the Middle Ages, particularly in the context of civil wars and rebellions, suggest that these events were closely connected to larger political and legal developments in the Scandinavian realms. These were the consolidation of monarchical authority, the centralization and institutionalization of the monarchy in close collaboration with the Church, and the introduction of new legal stipulations. However, parallel to this, narratives surrounding these executions imply resistance to those trends and justification of such resistance using different models of defiance. The author of a verse chronicle in Old Swedish from around 1320, Erikskrönikan (The Chronicle of Duke Erik), attempted to demonstrate the injustice of royal executions and the validity of resistance to unjust kings by siding with the executed rebels or magnates who fell from grace. The chronicler criticizes royal abuse of power and legitimates the concept of resistance by engaging with the notion of rebel martyrs and creating sympathy for the defeated party. Essentially, the chronicler condemns the ruling factions’ abuse of political power by portraying these executions as nothing more than illicit and illegal political murders.

In fourteenth-century Sweden, the depositions of several kings (Birger Magnusson in 1318, Magnus Eriksson in 1364 and Albrekt av Mecklenburg in 1389) were followed by the production of literary depictions of those monarchs’ reigns, pointing out their many faults, the wickedness of their advisors or the tyrannical nature of their rule. Some of these texts used allegorical imagery or satirical commentary to criticise kings such as Magnus Eriksson (r. 1319–64) and Albrekt (r. 1364–89), or employed other literary devices to present preceding or succeeding periods as more peaceful, prosperous or righteous. Thus, both Latin and vernacular literary works could serve a legitimating function, presenting the actions of the rebels as well as the succeeding regime as lawful and legitimate. In doing so, they can serve as valuable sources to describe the ongoing opposition and resistance to fourteenth-century Swedish kings.

Detta tvåbandsverk av filologen Jonathan Adams utforskar framställningen av judar och judendomen i östnordisk (fornsvensk och medeltidsdansk) litteratur från medeltiden. Medan den första volymen består av en omfattande kulturhistorisk studie av denna litteratur och hur förfrämligandet av judar däri fungerar, innehåller den andra omfångsrika volymen utgåvor av ett femtiotal källtexter med översättningar till modern engelska.

This chapter begins by discussing the different types and phases of crowdsourcing in terms of their possibilities for participants and problems for scholars. Forms of crowdsourcing such as volunteers’ transformation of content (existing institutional resources) and their production of new content differ from each other, and even more from projects explicitly including pedagogical aims and aspirations of co-production.

The chapter uses the example of a recent large-scale humanities research project that relied heavily on crowdsourcing, the Estoria DIgiTal (EDIT). After exploring crowdsourcing in the humanities through examining that and other projects in the cultural heritage sector, the humanities, and citizen history, the chapter moves on to themes of current relevance to public humanities and public history. It defines citizen humanities as a distinct, participatory rather than delegatory, type of project, and then discusses the impact and relevance of citizen humanities and volunteer commitment in terms of problems and possibilities. Finally, I outline the features of a citizen humanities that considers both knowledge production and the teaching of related skills.

I argue that to establish a field of genuine citizen humanities, we must learn how to teach research-related skills to participants and define transferable skills as a pedagogical outcome of such projects.

This new book on Castilian kingship by Fernando Arias Guillén seeks to shine further light on the neglected reign of Alfonso XI (1312–50) and those of his predecessors, Fernando IV and Sancho IV, most often overshadowed by the prominent image of the father of the latter, Alfonso X. The author studies a number of different topics relevant to kingship, its representation, and its practice, such as legitimacy, sacral kingship, the territoriality of the crown’s realms, itineration, royal burial sites, the corporate aspect of monarchy, or noble factionalism, among others. Through this, he intends to offer a general overview of the ways in which kingship was constructed and represented, and how this changed during a century of Castilian history, culminating in the consolidation of monarchic rule by the mature Alfonso XI, a “paradigm of successful kingship” and “emblematic of the ‘strong king’ archetype: a monarch who combined military prowess and ruling skills”.

The Castilian fourteenth-century author Don Juan Manuel is most renowned for his frame-tale collection of exempla, the Conde Lucanor (1335), but he wrote numerous works of fiction and history, always in a didactic vein. This article examines certain ‘reality elements’ in the fictional and historical tales of the Conde Lucanor and other works of its author, principally the use of autofiction and the insertion of historical figures in a fictional setting or their use in such a mode. This topic is approached through wider discussions about the distinction between allegorical and historical truth in Juan Manuel’s work, the discursive common ground between medieval history and fiction in terms of their plausibility, and the notion of the purported self-referentiality of fiction. It is argued that autofictional and other reality elements are not so much an attempt to verify or authenticate otherwise fictional narratives, as it is a conscious play on the common ground of the historical and the fictional mode, and part of a cohesive didactic strategy on the part of the author in question – interconnected with his social and political position in fourteenth-century Castile.

In fourteenth-century Sweden, several depositions of kings (in 1318, 1364, and 1389) were followed by the production of literary depictions of those kings’ reigns, pointing out their many faults, the wickedness of their advisors, or the tyrannical nature of their rule. Thus, Latin and vernacular literature could serve a legitimating function, presenting both the actions of the rebels and the succeeding regime as lawful. These texts were composed shortly after the events in question, giving one faction’s view of a recent conflict; they portray motivations, modes of composition, and a historical consciousness distinct from regnal history writing.

When kings are portrayed in medieval Castilian history writing from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as mourning the loss of sons to war or illness, grief is represented as debilitating and dangerous, if not moderated. Hence, the historiographical response to grief and sorrow demonstrates that not all displays of emotion by kings can be interpreted as intentional political acts or ritual display. Rather, the chronicles reveal instances of ideological use of emotions within history writing to disseminate certain ideas about kingship, gender, and emotions, which also contributed to forming lay noble emotional habitus. Chroniclers reveal an ideal that valued the transformation of sorrow into just anger and religious zeal, emotions whose functions were apparent in the ideological and military context of the Christian conquest of Muslim Spain.