Envisioning a Political Community: Peasants and Swedish Men in Vernacular Rhyme Chronicles, Late Fifteenth Century

Summary

For much of the late medieval period in Sweden, vernacular history writing took the form of rhyme chronicles, mainly depicting the recent past of the realm. The chronicles tended largely to deal with the shifting fortunes of the realm and its inhabitants under the rule of domestic kings, regents (riksföreståndare) and union kings, as well as the actions of some of the central agents in the power struggles of the period. As tools for political mobilization strongly favouring particular political actors, the rhyme chronicles aimed at persuading their audience of the legitimacy of a certain political order and the illegitimate claims of its challengers. This vision of a political community was therefore a fundamental part of both the prescriptive and descriptive operation of the chronicles and central both to the rhetoric of the chronicles and their representation of the past. This chapter focuses on one of these rhyme chronicles, now commonly referred to as the Sturekrönikan (the Sture Chronicle). The chronicle is a composite work, written at different stages and probably by different authors, and covers the period between 1452 and 1496.

The rhyme chronicles were the most comprehensive vernacular narratives of political events in late-medieval Sweden. They are thus vital for inquiring into the conceptions of identity and political culture in this period. What ideas, notions, and expectations did the Sturekrönikan's references to a ‘community of Swedes’ represent? What were the constituent parts of this political community? To what extent was this community unitary in terms of membership or constituent elements? The common and crucial aspect for all these questions were social and political differences, which can be seen as inherent in the notion of imagined community itself. The quest for unity and coherence within a community or against other communities simultaneously implied a continuous presence of difference, which threatened this unity. In other words, while narratives such as the Sturekrönikan sought to create a coherent and unitary political community, they necessarily preserved also certain shifts, tensions, and ambivalences within this imagination.

Since communities to a great extent define themselves through distancing themselves from other communities, this chapter focuses also on what distinguished this community and set it apart from others.