Christian Contradictions: The Structures of Lutheran and Catholic Thought (original) (raw)

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.