The cultural takeover of northern Europe by the inheritors of Latin and Greek Mediterranean Christianity may be studied as an alternative between two theoretical assumptions: that there was a deliberate decision on the part of the northerners to become Christians, or that a process of hostile and military force led to the submission of parts of the north to continental European Christianity. Referring to such historical categories, Flemmig studies two fourteenth-century personalities of Scandinavia and Poland, two women from the highest social groups, as material for his thesis that both these two cultural spheres were eager to adopt European Christian culture out of their own initiative and desire – they were not forced by military or any other pressure. The idea of Kulturtransfer refers to the process by which Scandinavian and Polish clergy and lay circles adopted patterns of continental culture, in this case the hagiography around Lady Birgitta Birgersdottir of Sweden (1303–73) and Queen Hedwig/Jadviga of Poland (1374–99). From the first pages Flemmig makes no secret of his view that the process is one of Selbsteuropäisierung – that the transfer of cultural patterns from the Greco-Roman world to northern Europe in these two cases is a process of turning to a new cultural universe with a deliberate choice of becoming Christians, thereby establishing themselves as Europeans or rather creating Europe afresh. Although Birgitta's vita from 1373 led to her canonisation as a saint of the Church (1391, confirmed 1415 and 1419), whereas Hedwig, queen and heir to Poland, in spite of her death in the ‘odour of sanctity’ never attained that honour – no vita was written for this reigning queen who was married to the recently-baptised Jogaila/Władysław Jagiełło of Lithuania – Flemmig investigates in this thorough and comprehensive dissertation public devotion and cult, post mortem miracles and well-known and famous works of charity and Christian virtues for both ladies. (Hedwig was eventually canonised in 1997.) Flemmig collects evidence that Lady Birgitta's devotion to the saints and her afterlife was an inspiration to Queen Hedwig in her lifetime. He argues that canonisation in Birgitta's case was more due to Scandinavians’ familiarity with classical hagiographical writings in prose and poetry and with the procedures at the Roman Curia for supplicants such as the emperor or the sovereign of the Scandinavian Kalmar Union who did not lack material resources to support their supplications (cf. lack of money as explanation for the Teutonic order's failure to have Dorothea of Montau canonised). Taking Christian Europe as an originally Mediterranean culture, Flemmig convincingly demonstrates how the idea of cultural transfer of similar hagiographical patterns in the two royal and noble women can be used as an instrument for a better understanding of the process of ‘autonomous and deliberate Europeanization’. There is an impressive bibliography including Scandinavian and Polish literature and useful hagiographic evidence in tabular form.