english summary 455 Ages, and that the administration of justice was the most important means of expressing political power. Moreover, it was in its judicial function that royal power chiefly made itself felt for other political actors in society. In addition, it was differences of opinion about the extent of judicial authority, more than anything else, that gave rise to competition between the king and the regional legal assembly and between the king and the church. The law established a persistent normative framework for the scope and direction of the exercise of royal power. At the same time, the law material give insight into medieval political thought through an understanding of what kind of law-regulated powers and resources different actors nominally had at their disposal. Opinions differ on the extent to which the medieval laws reflect an ideal situation or mirror the actual administration of justice. This question of the relationship between norm and practice, however, is not relevant for the present book. While it has been noted many times that Danish and Norwegian royal power in the twelfth and thirteenth century appears to have been stronger and more centralized than the Swedish counterpart, direct comparisons of royal power in the Scandinavian countries have been rare in previous research. In fact, comparative studies are relatively unusual in Scandinavian medieval history, and our knowledge of inter-Scandinavian similarities and differences in many spheres is consequently limited. Since different studies, mostly restricted to one country at the time, have focused on different aspects, and have sought to answer different questions, the possibility of using them to draw conclusions about inter-Scandinavian similarities and differences has been relatively small. This book seeks to remedy that deficiency as regards law-regulated royal power, by asking identical questions of the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish law material in a way that permits a rigid and systematic comparison. The situation as regards sources varies, since the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish law material is partially of different age and differs in the total amount of text, besides which different spheres of justice are treated with different levels of detail. This means that the comparison of processual changes has to be done by looking at certain points in time in different areas when the material overlaps in time. An initial hypothesis was that law-regulated royal power in the Scandinavian countries shows considerable similarities to other parts of Europe since Scandinavia was part of the same Roman Catholic cultural and religious sphere. There was political pluralism and particularism within the framework of cultural uniformity, and most local and regional differences
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