This book presents the fascinating story of Queen Margrete I and her rise to power in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, which culminated in the founding of the Nordic Union in 1397. Based upon the most central contemporary sources, the book gives a vivid picture of medieval society in Scandinavia. Well illustrated.

This book presents the fascinating story of Queen Margrete I and her rise to power in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, which culminated in the founding of the Nordic Union in 1397. Based upon the most central contemporary sources, the book gives a vivid picture of medieval society in Scandinavia. Well illustrated.

This book examines female lordship and the power of the political voice in medieval Northern Europe, focusing on three prominent, foreign-born queens of medieval Scandinavia - Agnes of Denmark (d. 1304), Eufemia of Norway (d. 1312) and Margareta of Denmark/Sweden (d. 1412) - who acted as cultural mediators and initiators of political change.

These twenty-six essays examine urban, rural, national, and imperial histories in Early Modern Europe and abroad, and politics in Reformation Switzerland, Burgundy, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Where medieval Denmark and Scandinavia as a whole has often been seen as a cultural backwater that passively and belatedly received cultural and political impulses from Western Europe, Professor Michael H. Gelting and scholars inspired by him have shown that the intellectual, religious and political elite of Denmark actively participated in the renaissance and reformation of the central and later medieval period. This work has wide ramifications for understanding developments in medieval Europe, but so far the discussion has taken place only in Danish-language publications. This anthology brings the latest research in Danish medieval history to a wider audience and integrates it with contemporary international discussions of the making of the European middle ages.