The present book collects five essays written by scholars working within the field of Old Swedish studies and aims at contributing to drawing scholarly attention to the literary richness of medieval Sweden. The texts examined in each paper have been analyzed from different viewpoints, taking into consideration not only previous research, but also new perspectives opened up by - more or less - recent methodological contributions and innovations in the fields of Theory of Literature, Linguistics, Cultural Studies, and History. Accordingly, a sort of file rouge that runs through all the papers and sews them together is the purpose of proposing new insights, or new interpretations, of such texts.

Within this common framework, each paper focuses on different aspects of the vernacular tradition of medieval Swedish literature, seen as part of the wider literary scenario of medieval Europe. As the title of the collection suggests, the texts examined in each essay belong to both secular and religious genres.

The attention devoted to highlighting the crucial interplay between text and context (of production and of reception) is shared amongst the essays.

Keywords: Old Swedish, Karl Magnus, Vadstena, Erikskrönikan, Dikten om kung Albrecht, Den vises sten, medieval Sweden, new philology, courtly culture, intertextual reading, nuns, literacy, devotional literature, vernacular manuscripts, Nyköping banquet, rhymed chronicals, literary pragmatics, historiography, literature and ideology, literature and historiography, political allegory, animal imagery, alchemy.