History, Politics, and Canon Law: The Resignation of Archbishop Eskil of Lund

Archbishop Eskil was leader of the Danish church for almost half a century, and although he is one of the individuals from twelfth-century Denmark we know the most about and who left the most traces, not least in the extant charter material, he remains one of the least studied. There is no scholarly biography of Eskil, who has been lingering in the historiographical shade of his successor, Absalon. The truism that history is written by the victors is appropriate here. The politics of memory and forgetting is their prerogative and in the case of twelfth-century Denmark, the winning party made sure that their version of events would be the one remembered in the future, woven into the first complete history of the Danish realm from its legendary beginnings to the contemporary present (1187), the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus.