The Role of Woman in Medieval Sweden on the Evidence of the Earliest Legal Texts

Abstract

Legal texts are aimed at maintaining order and defining what is legal in a given society. In the Middle Ages they often take the form of descriptions of situations and cases representing the conditions for the application of various rules. This combination of the normative and descriptive aspects of legal texts results in their importance as sources not only for legal, but also, more generally, for social and cultural history.
The importance of legal texts as historical sources is even greater when they represent the first – and for a while the only – texts to be written in the vernacular, as is the case for medieval Scandinavian legal texts. For this reason, an investigation of the earliest legal texts can highlight some aspects of life and society in Scandinavia at that time.