Margaretha Nordquist
Contact
Name and title: Margaretha Nordquist
ORCID0000-0003-2690-8554 Länk till annan webbplats.
Workplace: Department of History Länk till annan webbplats.
Visiting address Room D908Universitetsvägen 10 D, plan 8 och 9
Postal address Historiska institutionen106 91 Stockholm
About me
Margaretha Nordquist is researcher and senior lecturer at the Department of History and the Centre for Medieval Studies at Stockholm University.
I defended my PhD thesis (A Struggle for the Realm) at Stockholm University in 2015. My thesis is a study of late medieval Swedish history writing, Sturekrönikan and CronicaSwecie, as ideological expressions. My research interests are related to political, cultural, and social history, in particular people’s conceptions about the past, in the form of memory. I am interested in how such conceptions have been expressed in historiography and other narrative sources from the Middle Ages, and how they were used to sustain identities, norms, and arguments about power. I am also conducting research on gender, genealogy, women and power in the Middle Ages and early modern era.
Research areas:
- Medieval historiography and chronicles
- Cultural memory
- Identity formation processes and premodern conceptions of collective identities
- Women and power in medieval and early modern societies
- Genealogy
My general research interests concern historiography, memory and cultural continuity, and identity formation in medieval society. In my dissertation I analysed vernacular rhyme chronicles from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries as ideological expressions, where the representation of the past constituted arguments about power and the realm.
Women writing genealogy. Memory, kinship and identity formation in Sweden and Denmark c. 1400–1750
Currently, I am working on research project financed by Vetenskapsrådet (Swedish Research Council) that investigates constructions of family, community, and self in genealogical writings by aristocratic women in Sweden and Denmark between c. 1400–1750. There are several extant genealogical manuscripts, or family books (släktböcker), written and compiled by women from this period that point to the importance that they ascribed to the past. The project explores the varied contents of these manuscripts as expressions of memory culture, whereby the notion of genealogy as a gendered cultural phenomenon is seen as fundamental for conceptions of kinship, memory, and identity in the late medieval and early modern eras. These genealogical accounts can also potentially be seen as a bridge between family memories and the narratives of the realm or the state; or as a way of inscribing the family into the history of the community.
Conceptions about the past: identity formation, genealogy, and myths of origin in late medieval Scandinavia
In a previous project "Conceptions about the past: identity formation, genealogy, and myths of origin in late medieval Scandinavia", financed by Åke Wiberg Foundation, I examined how conceptions of the past are represented in various forms of discourse in the period c. 1350–1450, with a focus on genealogical models of memory and continuity, origin myths, and processes of identity formation on different levels in the Scandinavian area.
Regent consorts in medieval Sweden
Together with Kim Bergqvist, I am also doing research on the consorts of the Swedish regents of the realm in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The project investigates women’s agency, authority, and power within aristocratic and royal systems of rulership respectively (queenship studies).