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- Aldrin, Viktor, 1980-
(författare)
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Prayer in Peasant Communities : Ideals and Practices of Prayer in the Late Medieval Ecclesiastical Province of Uppsala, Sweden
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this study has been to identify, explain and delineate praying among peasant communities in the ecclesiastical province of Uppsala, Sweden. Four aspects have been examined through the perspectives of ideals and practices, namely the standards of prayer, devotional prayer, prayer in times of need and prayer cultures. The standards of prayer considered the physical and mental behaviour of the praying peasant woman or man. The most ordinary way to act during prayer was to stand with hands together, palm against palm, and to pray in the vernacular often using mental themes to enhance the devotion. Devotional prayers were foremost the three ‘standard’ prayers Paternoster, Hail Mary and Apostolic Creed, and could be used separately or combined. Prayer in times of need was possibly considered a matter of praying to saints, something that cannot be proven to have been either practiced or recommended on other, ordinary occasions where God and the Virgin Mary were considered the proper recipients of prayer. A few authentic prayers exist that were possibly said by peasant women and men in connection with miracles and these show the ability to construct elaborate prayers and to propose businesslike agreements with saints. These three prayers were required knowledge for a peasant woman or man and were put to the test in order to become a godparent, and were therefore made available in the vernacular by the parish priests. Ways to maintain the prayer cultures were through mnemonic techniques, and indulgences stipulating and confirming prayers used or to be used in connection with certain churches, days and places within the churches. Name saints could also be used, since the person and the name saint were considered to have a special bond. Prayer could also be used as protection for the living; since a prayer was considered to generate either merits or favours from a celestial patron to his or her client. The prayer life of those belonging to peasant communities was both elaborate and full of nuances.
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| 2. |
- Tjällén, Biörn
(författare)
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Church and nation : The discourse on authority in Ericus Olai's Chronica regni Gothorum (c. 1471)
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- 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.The thesis situates the production of the Chronica within the educational concerns of the Uppsala institution. It scrutinizes the commonplaces – derived from various fields of knowledge – through which Ericus articulated his dualist and nationalist assumptions. The realization of these notions in his historical account is examined in sections of the text where matters of importance for the Uppsala church are evident. Special attention is paid to Ericus’s account of the royal martyr, St Erik, the so-called Engelbrekt rebellion, and the contemporary strife between the Uppsala church and the kings. The thesis ends with a study of the reception of the Chronica in the 1520s, a time when the Reformation and the consolidation of a strong national monarchy in Sweden brought the authority issues addressed by Ericus to conclusion.
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