It’s March, Women’s History Month, and this year, as I write about two medieval women, I’d like to invite you to imagine with me for a minute:
Margareta had travelled a long way, and at a dangerous time: the Black Death was still ravaging the countryside, and going into the cities was particularly perilous. But Margareta had a clear motivation driving her travels: the needs of her people. Caught in a trade conflict and in the economic upheavals of the fourteenth century, the material needs of her people were many. She was concerned about those– but her greater concern was for their spiritual needs. Her own faith, and her visions, had convinced her of the truth of the Christian faith. She just needed some help and support in spreading that faith throughout the remote regions north of Uppsala. Perhaps, if she could finally meet Queen Margrete, she could receive that affirmation and support she needed. And much to her relief, Queen Margrete lived up to her reputation: when Margareta left her audience with the queen at the court in Malmö, she had a letter supporting her preaching and mission work and clearly laying out the message that she was to share among the Sámi.
Based on the historical sources that have survived, we can only guess that Margareta, might have had feelings and thoughts something like this in 1388-1389, as she traveled from city to city in southern Sweden and Denmark trying to meet with the Scandinavian Queen Margrete. While we cannot know for sure her exact experiences and perceptions, we can see the results, with references to Margareta and her work preserved in five letters from the 1380s-1414. Today, in a medieval extension of Adam Renberg’s “Mothers of the Church” series, we’ll take a look at Margareta, a missionary to northern Sweden, commissioned and sent by Margrete, queen of the joint Scandinavian kingdoms.
The Cause
We’ve already met Queen Margrete here at the Anxious Bench– she was the topic of one of my earlier women’s history month posts, where I focused on her role in developing policies that focused especially on caring for women and children. Queen Margrete also cared deeply about promoting faith, however, influenced perhaps by her education by one of the daughters of the noted visionary and abbess Bridget of Sweden. This perhaps played a role in this meeting with the missionary Margareta; Queen Margrete’s faith certainly shaped the letter that Margareta took with her after their meeting in Malmö.
The letter pictured here was from Queen Margrete and Magnus, the Archbishop of Lund. It asked two men (Henry, Archbishop of Uppsala, and Philip Karlsson, bailiff) to help and support Margareta in her work in the north: preaching the gospel, baptizing converts, and teaching the truths that form the focus of the queen’s letter:
. . . the eternal, almighty, living and true God, one indeed in substance, three in persons, a holy and individual trinity, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, who as He never had a beginning, so shall He never have an end, created all things out of time and out of nothing . . . because of sin, the friendship and innocence of God having been lost, the exiles and the lost immediately spread the root of malice and sin . . . the door of the heavenly kingdom was closed to the whole human race, which no creature could open, until the eternal Son of God the Father, coming to give blessing, through the great love with which he loved us, descended from the highest heaven into the womb of the Virgin Mary, from which Virgin, assuming humanity in God in an ineffable union of virginity, his glory remaining ineffably, was born of her the perfect God, the perfect man, the mediator between God and men, Christ Jesus. And after this, having appeared on earth and conversed with men, he taught the way of God in truth, and finally in the thirty-third year of his birth, in order to pay off his debt and reconcile the human race to God, he offered his body for us by dying on the cross and being buried, he rose from the dead on the third day. . . And the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken unto [the disciples], was taken up into heaven, while they beheld, and sits at the right hand of God; and shall come again with glory at the end of the world to judge the living and the dead. (Grönblad, Edward (ed.). Nya källor till Finlands medeltidshistoria, vol. 1, 19-21. All translations of Latin throughout this post are my own)
Clearly, the priorities of the queen and the missionary were in alignment: the important thing, affirmed by both in this theologically robust letter, was that those who had not heard the core of the Christian faith hear it.
The Commission
The above letter from Queen Margrete served as a “letter of attorney”, giving Margareta “fullmakt”, full authority, to preach and minister in the regions north of Uppsala (Bo Lundmark, “Medeltida vittnesbörd om Samerna och den Katolska kyrkan.” I Daniel Lindmark,Olle Sundström (red.): De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna. En vetenskaplig antologi. 2016, 232). Why Queen Margrete granted this authority, and why the male archbishops referenced in this letter respected it, is grounded in the words of Christ. In the August 6, 1389 letter quoted above, Queen Margrete describes Christ’s commission to his disciples as a central part of the Christian story: “[Jesus] also presented himself alive after his passion in many arguments, appearing to them for forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God, and saying to them: Go into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature: he that believes and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believes not shall be damned.” (Grönblad 19-21). A letter addressed to the Archbishop of Uppsala and reiterating support for Margareta’s work, tentatively dated to 1414 and written by Steno, Abbot of Munkaliv, opens with the same reference to Jesus’s commissioning of his disciples, directly connecting it to the work of Margareta: “her zeal to spread the faith” as well as “the pious affection of her soul, the devout sight, abstinences, labors, and vexations with which she is affected day and night” (Fellman, I. Handlingar Och Uppsatser, Angaende Finska Lappmarken Och Lapparne (1910), pp. 5-8). In short, those writing these letters in support of Margareta and her ministry saw her work as directly fulfilling Christ’s commission to his disciples. The cause of the Christian faith was more important than quibbles over authority.
Almost twenty-five years had passed between Queen Margrete’s 1389 letter and this 1414 one, urging support for the work of Margareta in evangelizing northern Sweden and affirming her ministry. But why was such a reiteration needed? The commission had not changed, nor had the needs of the people, so why would one need an episcopal letter to supplement a royal one?
The Context
The other letters that mention Margareta give us some insight into why her ministry perhaps required such consistent affirmation. A letter from the dean of Uppsala asks a group of church leaders to help clarify whether Margareta should be trusted as a spiritual authority: her claims to visions and appointments from the Lord created some concern as to whether her visions were from the Lord or from the devil: “Therefore, deign to insinuate something to us in your letters whether you consider it worthy that this woman herself be still piously worshipped or whether silence should be imposed on her, and whether those apparitions should be good Spirit illustrations and infusions, or the illusions of another spirit to be judged. We trust in the Lord that He will give us understanding in exploring these things.” It was through her visions that Margareta initially gained credibility with ecclesiastical figures, much like other female mystics. But these visions also caused unease. (Fellman, pp. 5-8).
Margareta’s identity as a woman also caused some ecclesiastical nervousness for the archbishops. Another letter, this one from the friar Philippus Petri, noted that “God also works His wonders in the weaker sex,” acknowledging this discomfort with female authority while also encouraging the clerics at Vadstena monastery to affirm and support Margareta in her diligent yet slow-moving evangelism work: “She is not to be despised but patiently heard. For although she makes little progress, yet perhaps God uses her as an instrument . . . this is ordered to the woman to take to the archbishop and not be ashamed to continue what she has begun.” (Fellman pp. 5-8).
The previously mentioned letter from Steno, Abbot of Munkaliv, highlights perhaps the third reason clerics required consistent persuasion to support Margareta’s work: this letter, the latest chronologically of the five letters, mentions that Margareta is not only working to preach and minister among the Indigenous Sámi people living north of Uppsala. Margareta herself, according to this letter, is also Sámi. In Margareta, we have an Indigenous woman visionary, given full authority by the Scandinavian Queen Margaret over the region north of Uppsala and affirmed several times across her decades of ministry by archbishops, friars, and other clerics.
Learning from Margrete and Margareta
It is unusual to find figures like Margareta in the premodern archives: in fact, Bo Lundmark notes that Margareta is the first named Sámi woman that we can find. Why can we see Margareta when so many other women (especially women from minorities) go unnamed in the sources? And what can we learn from her story?
I think we can see Margareta for a few reasons: her own faith, her persistence in pursuing ecclesiastical and royal support for her work, and her faithfulness in ministering for several decades. Solveig Wang, in a brief discussion of Margareta in her recent chapter on Sámi conversion in the Middle Ages, summarizes Margareta’s story as a story about Sámi and female agency in medieval Fennoscandia (Wang, “Saami Conversion and Identity Negotiation,” p. 123). And this is surely part of the story, but I don’t think it’s the part that would have mattered most to Margareta based on what we know about her, and perhaps not the part that the men she interacted with throughout her ministry noted either. Cornelia Heß’s recent article on Margareta notes that only one of the five letters mentions that Margareta is Sámi; her status as an Indigenous woman is less important to those interacting with her in her context than her visions and her emphasis on preaching and evangelism. We don’t usually think of the Middle Ages as a time when people were good at recognizing the gifts and work of women and minorities– but here we have Margareta given “all authority” to go and do the work that was needed. Margareta’s story, centering the words of Jesus from the gospels to “go and preach” rather than the usual hierarchies of her day, reminds us not to create obstacles or hedges to ministry where the scriptures have none.
I think we can also see Margareta and her ministry partially because of the work of Queen Margrete, another faithful woman from this period. In my previous post on Margrete, I talked about how she, as a woman, proved to be unusually attentive to the needs of the women she ruled. I think in her actions with Margareta, we see the queen being unusually attentive to the gifts of the women around her as well. While the archbishops were at times reluctant to give Margareta authority or respect, we see no such hesitation in Queen Margaret’s letter. Queen Margrete recognized Margareta’s faith and ministry and affirmed her, seemingly without hesitation. Again, this gives us an example to follow: to notice the gifts and callings of those around us and to affirm them without hesitation, even if their backgrounds or statuses are far separated from our own. To Margareta and Queen Margrete, it seems that the call to “go and preach” the core of the faith to the lost was what mattered most, over earthly hierarchies or boundaries– setting an example we can all hope to follow.
Resources:
Unfortunately, most of the sources (both primary and secondary) about Margareta are not in English, but in Latin, Swedish, and German. In good news, print versions of the Latin letters about her are available, so at least you do not have to also have paleographic skills to give them a look!
Editions of the Letters:
Diplomatarium Norvegicum 4. No 794. https://www.dokpro.uio.no/cgi-bin/middelalder/diplom_vise_tekst.cgi?b=4265&s=e&str=
Fellman, I. Handlingar Och Uppsatser, Angaende Finska Lappmarken Och Lapparne. Dokumenta Historica Quibus Res Nationum Septentrionalium Illanstrantur, v. 1-2. Finska litteratursällskapets tryckeri, 1910.
Grönblad, Edward (ed.). Nya källor till Finlands medeltidshistoria, vol. 1 (Copenhagen: Bianco Lunos Boktryckeri, 1857), 19-21.
Literature:
Heß, Cordelia. “Margaretas periphere Visionen. Mission, Kolonisierung und „race“ im Spätmittelalter am Beispiel der Saami.” Historische Zeitschrift, vol. 316, no. 1, 2023, pp. 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1515/hzhz-2023-0001.
Lundmark, Bo. “Medeltida vittnesbörd om Samerna och den Katolska kyrkan.” I Daniel Lindmark,Olle Sundström (red.). De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna. En vetenskaplig antologi. 2016.
Liedgren, Jan. “Margareta.” Svenskt biografiskt lexicon. https://sok.riksarkivet.se/sbl/artikel/9098. accessed 2026-02-26.
Wang, Solveig Marie. “Saami Conversion and Identity Negotiation in the Medieval Period.” In Colonial Entanglements and the Medieval Nordic World. De Gruyter, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111386676-005.
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