Words Spoken and Unspoken: Preachers and the Baltic Reformation in the Younger Europe (original) (raw)
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2005
The latest of CUP's gargantuan Cambridge Histories deals with Scandinavia and for once the first volume to appear is also the first volume in the sequence. The definition of Scandinavia reflects the vernacular usage Norden rather than Skandinavia and the volume covers the history not only of Norway, Sweden and Denmark but also Finland and the Atlantic colonies of Iceland, Greenland, the Faeroes and the Scottish islands although the degree to which the more marginal parts of this vast area are covered varies considerably from contribution to contribution. As with all such collaborative volumes, and this volume comprises twenty-five chapters by twenty-eight contributors, the quality of the work varies considerably from essay to essay. It is particularly regrettable that some contributors, such as Magnús Stefánsson chose to use very few references, leaving the reader to wonder about the evidential base of many of his statements. Other contributors, such as Eljas Orrman, provide plenty of footnotes that will keep the inter-library loan department of this reviewer's university busy for some time to come. Overall one might note the high average age of the contributors : three were dead and a further eight emeritus at the time of publication. To some extent the length of time the volume has been in production accounts for this yet one cannot but wonder to what extent we are really being presented with a cutting edge vision of medieval Scandinavia. One of the most intriguing aspects of reading this volume at a single sitting was the constant awareness that the differences in the history of the three kingdoms, Norway, Denmark and Sweden, might be as much a product of dominant national historiographies as medieval experience. Some of the contributors are aware of this and, for example, a number of them seem somewhat to suspect that the far greater impact that the Black Death seems to have had upon Norway may be historiographical. The narrative of this volume, insofar as it has one, is the tale of the failed unification of Scandinavia. In the Late Iron Age Scandinavians shared a common language and many cultural traits and, in the course of the medieval period, the Danish kingdom came to dominate the whole region in much the same way that first Wessex and then England came to dominate the British Isles. The volume ends, however, with the Stockholm massacre, the act of punitive oath-breaking by which Christian II threw away for ever the hope of enforcing Danish sovereignty in Sweden. In many ways modern Scandinavia is a failed state which has much in common with pre-Viking Age England, early medieval Ireland or Germany before the rise of the second Reich.
PRELUDE TO THE REFORMATION? MUNICIPAL PREACHERS AT THE TIME OF THE HUSSITES
Śląski Kwartalnik Historyczny Sobótka LXXII, Numer specjalny / Special issue, 2017
The aim of the study is the analysis of various levels of late medieval communication of the preacher with the town milieu (in the sense of the "sociology of medieval preaching") that will focus on both the verbal and non-verbal levels of communication. The comparatively based study will concentrate on the ways of acquiring power and dealing with it, as well as on the strategies of endangered town elites that were directed at the elimination of the dominance of the charismatic religious leaders.
2021
This monograph investigates how religious coexistence functioned in six towns in the multiconfessional region of Upper Lusatia in Western Bohemia. Lutherans and Catholics found a feasible modus vivendi through written agreements and regular negotiations. This meant that the Habsburg kings of Bohemia ruled over a Lutheran region. Lutherans and Catholics in Upper Lusatia shared spaces, objects, and rituals. Catholics adopted elements previously seen as a firm part of a Lutheran confessional culture. Lutherans, too, were willing to incorporate Catholic elements into their religiosity. Some of these overlaps were subconscious, while others were a conscious choice. This monograph provides a new narrative of the Reformation and shows that the concept of the ‘urban Reformation’, where towns are seen as centres of Lutheranism has to be reassessed, particularly in towns in former East Germany, where much work remains to be done. It shows that in a region like Upper Lusatia, which did not hav...
'Forgetting Lutheranism: Historians and the Early Reformation in Poland, 1517-48’
Textbooks routinely state that the Reformation had no major impact in the Polish kingdom before c.1550. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, however, German and Polish scholars produced a substantial body of archivally-based literature which described at length the rapid rise of Lutheranism in the kingdom of Zygmunt I (1506-48). This article explores how and why this research was forgotten or pushed to the sidelines in the wake of World War II - as German scholarship pulled away from writing about 'German' minorities in Central Europe, and as Polish scholarship came to define the 'Polish Reformation' in a newly narrow way, as an event experienced by 'ethnic' Poles only, which could not encompass the 'German' creed of Lutheranism. The article argues that collective forgetting, and the jettisoning of unwelcome early modern pasts, in Central Europe has undermined our wider grasp of the geography and trajectories of the early European Reformation.
Lutheran Churches in Early Modern Europe
Until recently the impact of the Lutheran Reformation has been largely regarded in political and socio-economic terms, yet for most people it was not the abstract theological debates that had the greatest impact upon their lives, but what they saw in their parish churches every Sunday. This collection of essays provides a coherent and interdisciplinary investigation of the impact that the Lutheran Reformation had on the appearance, architecture and arrangement of early modern churches. Drawing upon recent research being undertaken by leading art historians and historians on Lutheran places of worship, the volume emphasises often surprising levels of continuity, reflecting the survival of Catholic fixtures, fittings and altarpieces, and exploring how these could be remodelled in order to conform with the tenets of Lutheran belief. The volume not only addresses Lutheran art but also the way in which the architecture of their churches reflected the importance of preaching and the administration of the sacraments. Furthermore the collection is committed to extending these discussions beyond a purely German context, and to look at churches not only within the Holy Roman Empire, but also in Scandinavia, the Baltic States as well as towns dominated by Saxon communities in areas such as in Hungary and Transylvania. By focusing on ecclesiastical 'material culture' the collection helps to place the art and architecture of Lutheran places of worship into the historical, political and theological context of early modern Europe.
Chapter 16 Rome: Jerusalem or Seat of the Antichrist? Lutheran Polemics in Sixteenth-Century Sweden
Tracing the Jerusalem Code, 2021
The following chapter, playing perhaps on Tertullian's famous quip, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" asks the question, "What has Rome to do with Jerusalemduring the Swedish Reformation?" In answer to this question this chapter examines "Some Songs about the Antichrist" 1536, a collection of hymns from the Swedish Reformation, including the historical difficulties associated with such an investigation, and describes a If the abstract is set in italics this should not be in italics, and vice versa. of sorts, which can be observed in these hymns and in the thought and polemic of the Swedish Reformation. Rome is here not described as a second Jerusalem or the new Jerusalem, a holy city. In contrary, Rome is depicted as a depraved place, the unholy city. However, most of the polemical elements which the Reformation used against the Roman Church, the pope, and the papacy had already existed some hundred years before Martin Luther and are thus reappropriated in the polemical writings published during the age of Reformation. "Some Songs about the Antichrist" 1536 thus show that the Jerusalem code still existed during the Scandinavian Reformation, both as an inversion and a reappropriation: the Christian's future hope is not found in a certain place but in the vera doctrina lutherana and the right conduct of life. Although these texts can be anchored in a cultural and theological context, merely deriving from the Middle Ages, they reveal that we do not know much about the context of this publication: we lack information about how and when the different ideas expressed in these polemical songs found their way to Sweden, we do not even know much about the origin of these songs, the author, or the reception of these texts.