The paper reports an historical-archaeological study of a place in Stockholm’s Old Town that has been associated with German immigrants since the 12th century. Today’s Juno Quarter was once the site of a hall that hosted the ceremonies and feast-day celebrations of the Saint Gertrud guild. Historical sources say it was the largest of some 20 guildhouses in medieval Stockholm, yet nothing is known about its size and shape, or whether and how it was incorporated into the chapel built on the site in 1580 or the church that stands there today, built in 1682. Drawing on the ideas and techniques of buildings archaeology, the undercroft is analysed with the aim of situating the place of the guildhouse in the space of medieval Stockholm, at the crossroads between royal power (it lay down the hill from the castle), clerical power (it was in the shadow of the Blackfriars monastery, dismantled after the Reformation) and commercial power (it would have overlooked the harbour where the Baltic Sea met Lake Mälaren, on which iron ore was transported from the north, bound for the continent). With the use of analogies, the place that the Stockholm Germans made for themselves is situated in the larger context of a medieval Europe undergoing dynamic urbanisation, and the rise of a cosmopolitan mercantile class.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-225279 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Robertson, Alexa |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för arkeologi och antikens kultur |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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