Genealogi är inte enbart en metod för att ordna släktsamband över tid, utan speglar också kulturella och genuspräglade föreställningar om familj, minne och det förflutna. Under 1500-talet skrev tre kvinnor – Anna Fickesdotter Bülow, Birgitta Andersdotter och Margareta Grip – tidiga genealogiska verk i Sverige. Trots olika miljöer visar deras texter hur släktkunskap kan vara förbunden med personliga erfarenheter, livslopp och förlust. Genom ett perspektiv på kulturellt minne framträder genealogin som en praktik som förbinder text, materia och relationer. Texterna förenar släkthistoria med minnesskapande, men gestaltar det förflutna på olika sätt: som sorg och nostalgi, som självreflexiv livstolkning, eller som en mer framåtblickande och hoppfull återblick.

Genealogy functions not only as a method for organizing kinship ties over time, but also expresses cultural and gendered conceptions of family, memory, and experiences of the past. In the 16th century, three women—Anna Fickesdotter Bülow, Birgitta Andersdotter, and Margareta Grip—wrote some of the earliest genealogical works in Sweden. Despite working in partly different historical contexts, their writings share an emphasis on how knowledge of family lineage is closely connected to personal memories, aging, the course of life, and loss.

Anna Fickesdotter and Birgitta Andersdotter were Birgittine nuns in Vadstena, and their texts are closely tied to a medieval religious and intellectual environment. Margareta Grip, by contrast, belonged to the high nobility of early modern Sweden and wrote in a different social and material context. All three authors appear as distinct, self-aware “I” figures in their works, demonstrating that genealogical writing offered women a way to articulate both personal and collective identity.

Through the perspective of cultural memory, genealogy emerges as an imaginative world sustained not only through text, but also through places, objects, and social relations. The analysis shows that the three works weave together family history with the work of memory: what is remembered, what has been lost, and what one wishes could be recalled. At the same time, the works represent different ways of looking back: Anna Fickesdotter conveys nostalgia and sorrow over the losses brought by time, Birgitta Andersdotter links the memory of her own life course to a family narrative, whereas Margareta Grip formulates a more hopeful retrospection, framed by gratitude and a forward-looking interpretation of life.

Historia Sancti Olai är en framställning av Olav den heliges liv på knittelvers vars tillkomst ofta har placerats i den kontext av historieskrivande som pågick i kretsen kring kung Karl Knutsson i Stockholm i mitten på 1400-talet. Genom att den enda bevarade versionen finns i en handskrift från 1520-talet kan krönikan också knytas till en annan litterär miljö och en annan av senmedeltidens politiska aktörer, nämligen Linköpings stift och dess biskop Hans Brask. Dessa båda tidpunkter omspänner en period av litterär verksamhet som i hög grad handlade om historieskrivning och det förflutna som verktyg för politiska ambitioner. Den här artikeln diskuterar Historia Sancti Olai i relation till de svenska rimkrönikorna – den tradition av att skriva samtidshistoria på folkspråk och på knittelvers som var påtagligt produktiv i senmedeltidens Sverige. Den visar hur rimkrönikegenren kunde användas för att förmedla vissa teman med relevans för den samtida politiska kontexten.

Anna Fickesdotter Bülow (1440s–1519), abbess of the Birgittine Vadstena Abbey in Sweden, was also the author of Chronicon Genealogicum (c. 1515), a genealogical narrative of aristocratic families in late medieval Sweden. Anna Fickesdotter’s chronicle is one of the earliest examples of women writing genealogy in Sweden. It sheds light on the roles of women in the transmission and commemoration of family history, genealogy as a gendered imagination and practice, but also the scripting of self as a subjective voice and a woman remembering the past. The account is analysed as an expression of medieval memory culture, where genealogy as a gendered phenomenon had a fundamental impact on the mental, material, and social dimensions of memory.

Anna Fickesdotter Bülow (1440s–1519) was the abbess of Vadstena Abbey, a Birgittine monastery in Sweden, in the early sixteenth century. She came from an aristocratic family of German and Danish origin and entered Vadstena Abbey in 1462 to become a Birgittine nun. She was elected abbess of Vadstena Abbey in 1501 and remained in this office until her death in 1519. Anna Fickesdotter was described as a learned woman in the Diarium Vadstenense, the monastery’s memorial book. She contributed to the monastery’s literary production as author, translator, and supervisor of the sisters’ manuscript production. Among her translations are the Legend of Saint Joachim and the Revelations of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, which were part of a compilation of texts intended for the sisters’ table reading. Around 1515, she also wrote Chronicon Genealogicum, one of the earliest genealogical chronicles in medieval Sweden, which was printed in 1718. The chronicle was written on behalf of the bishop of Linköping and contains information about Anna Fickesdotter’s own family history, personal memories, as well as a survey of kinship relations within the Swedish aristocracy mainly from the fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries.

För 500 år sedan försvarades Stockholms slott av den unga Kristina Gyllenstierna mot den danske unionskungen Kristian II. Hon var den sista i raden av handlingskraftiga svenska riksföreståndargemåler vilkas roll inom den nordiska politiken under Kalmarunionens slutskede sällan uppmärksammats.

The purpose of this article is to discuss the expression of political emotions and memory in the vernacular rhymed chronicle Karlskrönikan (Karl’s chronicle), written on behalf of the Swedish king Karl Knutsson (Bonde) in the 1450s. Historical studies of emotions and memory have been prominent in the dynamic field of cultural history but more rarely as a combined approach to explore the temporal aspects of emotional expressions. This article focuses attention on the chronicle’s communicative function and the notion that emotions and memory are integral parts in the construction of human experience and validation of power. Expressions of emotion in the chronicle were analysed as scripts, or narrative sequences, and the result shows how emotions appear in clusters of feelings such as wrath, shame, and sorrow. Emotions are instrumental in the characterization and moral evaluation of actors, their actions, and motives. They provide a visual acuity and energy to the narrative that reinforce the memorability of past events. The chronicle’s reference to the wrath of Saint Erik illustrates the complex uses and meanings of wrath in the chronicle. Wrath can be used both as a mark of legitimate power and of uncontrolled envy or lust for power. This is particularly apparent in the chronicle’s attempt to represent Karl Knutsson as a legitimate ruler, who shows emotional restraint and honorable conduct both in dealing with unruly peasants and envious contenders for power.

This article investigates different, but partly overlapping, memorializing processes linked to the Battle of Brunkeberg (1471). In the decades after the battle, memories of the battle not only served to construct the event as a narrative of victory that reinforced notions of legitimate power and a Swedish community, but also formed the basis of potentially divisive emotions of fear and anxiety among the people in periods of political turbulence. The analysis of memory as articulations of co-existing, partly contradictory, and selective narratives and symbolic expressions shows how various memory practices and formats intersect in the political culture and identities of the past.

The representation of time in historiographical narratives reveals important conceptions about origin, continuity and change, and the perceived links between the past, present and future in a society. Through temporal structures of meaning such as genealogy, political power can be explained, legitimized and reinforced in narratives of the origin and history of a people and its rulers. The aim of this article is to investigate the construction of political time in two fifteenth-century Old Swedish narratives, Prosaiska krönikan and Lilla rimkrönikan. These chronicles constitute some of the first attempts to write continuous histories of the Swedish realm and its rulers from time immemorial. While the two chronicles share basic temporal structures, their different narrative forms also involve shifting emphases in their representation of a political time that functions as the basis for claims to a precedence of power and authority in relation to the other Scandinavian kingdoms. By considering temporal structures of meaning in the two chronicles, light can be shed on the political and ideological utility of history writing in late-medieval Sweden.

År 1452 dömdes frälsekvinnan Birgitta Olofsdotter Tott till döden för förräderi. Vem var denna kvinna och vilka omständigheter låg bakom dödsdomen mot henne? Den här artikeln handlar om det dramatiska händelseförlopp som ledde fram till dödsdomen mot Birgitta, men också om hur släktband och lojaliteter sattes på prov i tider av politisk oro och krig i senmedeltidens svenska rike.