I will argue that the different textual traditions that I discuss should be seen as part of a larger process of Europeanisation. In Chapters 2–5, I will explore the specific elements in romance that seem to have been most crucial in this Europeanisation process, and which also played a role in the emergence of a Swedish literary culture. But before this analysis can be undertaken, I wish in this first chapter to pause to consider the notion of ‘Europeanisation’ in relation to the historical context of medieval Sweden.

In his discussion of ‘immagined communities’, Benedict Anderson maintains that three cultural conceptions needed to be dissolved before national communities could be imagined: first, ‘the idea that a particular script-language offered privileged access to ontological truth’ – which, in the West, was Latin; second, ‘the belief that society was naturally organized around and under high centres – monarchs who were persons apart from other human beings and who ruled by some form of cosmological (devine) dispensation’; third ‘a conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable’. He then draws particular attention to the role of ‘print-capitalism’ and argues that the first print-languages ‘laid the bases for national consciousness’. All romances studied in this book were written before the imagined communities of nations would be possible, if we follow Anderson's arguments. However, even though nations as they are understood today did not exist in the Middle Ages, courtly literature could be seen as one of the core roots of modern national culture(s). When Queen Eufemia ordered three texts to be translated into Swedish, the linguistic identities of the source and target cultures were already well articulated; at least, this is what is implied by the reference in Herr Ivan to how Eufemia ‘læt þæssa bokena vænda svo / af valske tungo ok a vart mal’ (vv. 6436–37) (had this book translated from French into our language). The use of the pronoun ‘vart’ signals a community, defined in terms of its vernacular language, that has motivated the whole translation. Thus, the translations of courtly romances reveal how one distinct linguistic community, in this case the Francophone community, is opposed to another, here the Swedish. As the next chapter will show, Herr Ivan is, indeed, a translation from one language to another, but it is also a conscious cultural adaptation.