Anders Winroth and "the conversion of Scandinavia," a deconstruction of the traditional narrative

For hundreds of years, Anglophone narrative of the Scandinavian conversion to Christianity has remained incredibly biased toward Western European actors by virtue of ignorance and a lack of archaeological evidence. Though the Scandinavian academic community has written extensively on the subject within the past two decades, very little of that work had been exposed to Anglophone academics. Just four years ago, Yale historian and native Swede Anders Winroth set out to fix this incredible discrepancy in his critically-acclaimed work, The Conversion of Scandinavia: Vikings, Merchants, and Missionaries in the Remaking of Northen Europe. This thesis will assess the prior historiography of the Scandinavian conversion, the individual arguments presented in Winroth's book, and its reception within the academic community.