Research project Danish and Swedish provincial laws from the 13th century in a comparative perspective

During recent decades, scholarly interest in the medieval Nordic laws has increased, and studies have focused on new aspects of the laws. At the same time, this new research has seldom included more comprehensive comparisons or quantitative analyses. Therefore, the objective of this project is to complement existing research on medieval Nordic laws with a compressive quantitative and comparative assessment. The methods used in the project entails systematic comparison and classification of individual legal provisions and has been developed and tested in earlier research.

In this project, the analysis is extended to Danish laws from the late 12th century to the late 13th century, and to comparison between Danish and Swedish 13th century laws. These laws belong to the period of transition between oral law and text-based law, and when ecclesiastical and royal power were increasing albeit still weak in many respects.

The project analyses similarities and differences between Danish and Swedish provincial laws – as well as between provincial laws from different points in time – as regards the proportion of legal provisions belonging to different fields of law, as regards penal systems and prescribed consequences as well as the proportions of civil, criminal, procedural, and public law. We also investigate variations in the ways the individual laws are structured that is, whether different legal provisions can be considered more casuistic or more abstract. 

The applied methods and research questions combined can uncover differences and similarities between individual laws, and different stages of the legal development, which can be difficult to detect in traditional qualitative studies in legal history. This means that the project will contribute to the general knowledge of the medieval legal development in the Nordic countries, of early stages in the process of state formation, and of the process towards increased use of, and dependency on, the written language in medieval society.