The Scandinavian Reformation

The first study in English of church, state and society during the Scandinavian Reformation.

This volume provides a history of the Scandinavian Reformation from its evangelical beginning in the 1520s to its institutionalisation by the mid-seventeenth century. It reassesses the role of the Catholic Church in trying to halt the reformation and traces the evangelical movements in their social context.When Martin Luther's protest began making an impact in Scandinavia in the 1520s, this region belonged to the religious and political periphery of Europe. A century later the Nordic countries had become of paramount importance to European Protestantism, and it was the intervention of Lutheran Scandinavia in the Thirty Years' War which helped secure the survival of European Protestantism. This volume describes how the Nordic countries came to be solidly Lutheran states by the early seventeenth century; how the evangelical movements differed and succeeded, and the different pace of reform and its institutionalisation. It offers a revisionist view of the role of the Catholic Church in Scandinavia, and its attempts to halt the reformation, and demonstrates the difficulties facing the new Lutheran churches trying to convert a conservative, peasant population to Protestantism.