You know, being a Swede myself and after having read various books about her, and being filled with the schoolday stuff about her, I nowadays kinda´ frwon when I hear her name and especially whe I hear people applauding her.

If you want to follow that her father, King Gustav II Adolph, went through a 30 year long war for the sake of (ok, not only) ousting the Catholic religion and make a win for the Protestants, he must have turned in his grave if he knew that his daughter after only 4 years on the throne, chose to abdicate and to convert to Catholicism onnly a coupe of months later. She didn´t even stay long enough to make an inmpact on the reign.

However you can say that she made an impact because she was a woman. Would a man, acting the same way she did, have gained the same amount of historical reputation? I´m not sure. Yet, what we often read about her, is that she worshipped her father, looked up to him. Now that somehow doesn´t ring very true...

She so easily gave up all of what her father had worked and strived for. She so easily gave up what her duty on the throne asked her to do. What for? All to follow her own ideas, her own conviction.

I´m not sure that is always laudable. True, it sounds remarkable that she as a woman dared to stand up and go her own way. And that at a time where most women were, well, shall we say, at least tied down to home and hearth.

It is worth mentioning here that her father, Gustav II Adolph, was considered the "Lion from the North" and not only because he was blonde and statuesque. Now there was a man who made an impact, apparently *g*

But she wasn´t among "most women". She was born into a royal family and she had her future cut out for her. There was a country to take responsibility for, and there was a people who needed a regent. Instead she up and left it all in the hands of her cousin, who, history proved later, wasn´t really cut out for it. But Kristina chose to pursue her intellectual and spiritual interests. As if that had been impossible to combine?

I will always be curious about how things would have worked out, had she stayed on the throne. Had it been for better, or had she made a disaster of it all....