the svea court of appeal in the early modern period 406 We have to deal with a period of contradictions between jurisdictional competitions and conflicts between representatives for the national law and those supporting the reception of international elements of law. European law and legal sources have influenced Nordic law since medieval times.Despite an initial phase in the earlymodern period characterized by a more nationally-oriented politics and reluctance in the reception of foreign law, from a general perspective the early modern period was characterized by transparency regarding legal transplants and legal transfers. An important change occurred with the Lutheran Reformation, resulting in a divided Europe as far as the Christian religion and the canon law was concerned. The reformation separated northern Europe from Rome. In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church and its high court, the Rota Romana in Rome had also included the Nordic countries within its canon law jurisdiction. The influences from and the reception of canon law were substantial in the Nordic countries, especially in family law and legal process. But although canon law was abolished, there was an enduring legal culture which included religious law, and resulted in the application of the Old Testament. When the Swedish students on their peregrinatio academica went to sixteenth-century protestant universities they still could take classes in canon law. The legal effects of the Swedish reformation were not (as in Denmark and Norway) iconoclastic, retaining a continuity with the past unbroken until the Uppsala Meeting of 1593 when the Swedish Church became an established church. The towns and market courts developed medieval commercial law to a great extent. The members of the Hanseatic League (with its centre in Lübeck) dominated commerce in the towns around the Baltic Sea. The town’s courts handled commercial conflicts with merchants as parties as well as judges, as well as introducing the lawyers, the merchants’ lawyers, in the Baltic Area. The first professional lawyers in court cases in the Stockholm town courts were identified as a new element of the legal culture during the first decades of the seventeenth century, several of them representing international merchants.1158 1158 Petrén, Sture 1947 pp. 1 ff. Europeanization of Swedish Legal Culturein the Seventeenth Century
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