Memoirs of Leonora Christina

Memoirs of Leonora Christina is the English translation of Jammers Minde, the autobiography of Leonora Christina Ulfeldt (1621-1698), the Danish princess imprisoned for twenty-two years in the Blue Tower of Copenhagen Castle from 1663 to 1685.

Leonora Christina was the daughter of King Christian IV of Denmark by his morganatic second marriage. She married Corfitz Ulfeldt, the most powerful Danish nobleman of the mid-seventeenth century, whose subsequent political fall and treason charges led to years of European exile. After Ulfeldt’s death in 1664, Leonora Christina was arrested on her return to Denmark and held without trial in the Blue Tower for two decades.

The memoirs were written during her imprisonment and record her life with long detail about seventeenth century Danish royal politics, her exile years, and the conditions of her imprisonment. The Danish manuscript was preserved in family hands until publication in 1869, after which it became one of the central documents of Danish literary tradition. English translations appeared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and made the memoir available to international readers.