The Royal Chapel – The Religious Space of Medieval Swedish Monarchy

This project examines the royal chapel and its significance for kingship in the Swedish Middle Ages. The chapel was the site for the king’s personal devotion but also a marker of his unique position in society.

Founded by papal privilege and autonomous from the diocesan structure of the church, staffed with loyal clerics and decked out with the powerful relics of the saints – the very existence of the royal chapel declared that the king was no ordinary Christian! The project considers the chapel as a formal institution, with resources that empowered the individual king to act.

Historians have observed that the chapel was politically important because it housed the early central administration, but this project takes a wider view and brings its religious functions to the centre of the political-historical attention.

It takes into account that the term capella regis covered three separate realities – the spaces for the king’s worship, the clerics that catered for his religious needs, and his treasury of relics and liturgical objects – and examines how each aspect contributed to royal authority and government.

Taking stock of a range of documentary, architectural and artistic remains of the chapel institution, and inspired by theories from the field of material religion, the project asks how it served the religious needs of the king and simultaneously helped him govern, and what this tells us about the nature of Swedish political culture and its changes over the Middle Ages.