The Protracted Reformation in the North

Volume III from the Project "The Protracted Reformation in Northern Norway" (PRiNN)

Sigrun Høgetveit Berg, Rognald Heiseldal Bergesen, Roald Ernst Kristiansen

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110686289
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

The formation of the European nation states was deeply affected by the Reformation processes during the 16th century. In order to understand today's Europe, it is necessary to come to terms with the historical processes that shaped these emerging nation states. The book discusses such processes with particular attention to how they affected the northernmost parts of Europe. The book consists of three main parts: 1) Church and State, 2) Interaction and Networks, 3) Ideas and Images. In the first part, the authors examine various aspects of the relationship between the church and the state, and how the Reformation processes contributed to reshape this relationship. In the second part, the development of the social and economic networks among the population of Northern Fennoscandia is mapped, taking account of how such networks were affected by different ethnic groups. The role of the church and the mission in the state integration of the Northern borderless areas is also examined, as well as the new Lutheran clergy and their social and material conditions. In the third part, the visual and material expressions of the Reformation period is analyzed, as well as the encounter between the Catholic, the Lutheran and the Sámi religion.

Part I: Church and State

A Matter of the Learned: Ways of Reformation Knowledge from Germany to the North

Arnold Otto

Being introduced by Luther, a professor in a German university town, the Reformation appears to have been a phenomenon closely tied to higher education and professional training for the clergy. Universities emerged during a time when parts of Scandinavia were still becoming Christian, and this institution reached areas north of Denmark only in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, when numerous changes in society were taking place all over Europe. When considering the role a specific German variety of university education played during the Reformation in Scandinavia, and especially in Northern Norway, I would first like to present some thoughts about the history of Scandinavian institutions of higher education.

Medieval Universities in Scandinavia

Uppsala

Only two universities were founded in Scandinavia – that is to say, in the Kalmar Union – during the fifteenth century: Uppsala in 1477 and Copenhagen in 1479.¹ However, Uppsala was in severe difficulties during the period of the Reformation. This university had been founded as a studium generale early in the 51-year-long pontificate of the last medieval archbishop of Uppsala, Jacob Ulvsson. He was appointed in 1470 and fought for this university until he resigned in 1515 due to old age. We do not know whether his resignation was ever acknowledged in Rome, and Ulvsson died in 1521. In the same year, Gustav Wasa became Protector of the Realm (riksföreståndare) and later king of Sweden. To repress past Danish influences, Sweden left the Kalmar Union. Gustav Wasa’s leading interest was independence: independence from the Danish king, independence from his original supporters from across the Baltic Sea in Lübeck, and also independence from the offspring of Ulvsson’s favorite project in Uppsala. Having grown and flourished for almost 50 years until 1523, it was roughly the same 50 years thereafter that the University of Uppsala existed on paper only before it began to flourish again in the later 16th century.

Lund

Another institution with a similar fate was the medieval Franciscan studium generale at Lund Cathedral. It was founded before the Reformation, when Sweden was under Danish rule in 1425, and it was forced to close in 1536. The present University of Lund was founded after the Treaty of Roskilde (1658) in 1666 by the Swedes themselves, and looking at all the celebrations for its 350th jubilee in 2016, we can see that it does not claim continuation with the 1425 institution. In the history of higher education in Scandinavia, this institution appears to be ranked as a cathedral school rather than a university. Neither of the studia generale, Uppsala and Lund, was able to offer its students more than a bachelor degree at any time: it seems that neither the Middle Ages nor the period of the Reformation in Sweden were a matter of the learned.

Copenhagen

Therefore, let us turn to the University of Copenhagen. As mentioned earlier, it was founded in 1479 as a university. A papal privilege had been granted as early as 1475 and thus Copenhagen went the way of most medieval universities, as an institution under joint supervision of ecclesiastical and secular authorities, establishing faculties of theology, philology, law, and medicine. In 1531, ecclesiastical permission was withdrawn to prevent the spread of the Reformation. The university was formally reinstated by King Christian III in 1537 without papal privilege as a Protestant institution and, like at Lund, this year is taken as its foundation year. Keeping in mind how academic functions had decayed at Lund and Uppsala in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, it would be interesting to know what happened at Copenhagen in those roughly five years between 1531 and 1537. If there was an interruption of academic practice here at all, it was rather short and any student would have been able to bridge it through taking up work or going to another university instead.

Preliminary Conclusion

But which University could that be? To find one, Scandinavian students would have had to go to the British Isles or southwards, to mainland Europe, as they seem to have done frequently. Talking about this phenomenon, we have to keep some preliminaries in mind as a first conclusion:

1. Latin worked very well as a lingua franca in medieval European higher education. When the so-called Wiener Schule around Johann von Neumarkt and Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl started to read and write academic works of theology in the German vernacular towards the end of the fourteenth century, this was a massive innovation in an otherwise completely Latin context.
2. Students travelling often and over long distances to a university town was common in medieval times. The attachment of universities to individual princes was not as important in the Middle Ages as it was later in early modern times, when territorial princes, running territorial churches, wanted to establish territorial universities in order to have a regional intellectual elite sharing their Christian denomination.
3. Scandinavians were great travelers in general. According to the research of Christian Krötzl² (2001), we can picture a very well-developed medieval system of travel on the Baltic and in the coastal regions of the North Sea. By the year 1517, a German student would have the choice between the universities of Prague, Vienna, Erfurt, Heidelberg, Cologne, Würzburg, Leipzig, Rostock, Trier, Greifswald, Freiburg, Ingolstadt, Mainz, Tübingen, Frankfurt/Oder, and Wittenberg – sixteen institutions. With an annual or even semestrial home leave, this meant a walking distance from most areas in the German-speaking realms. Therefore, German students were often able to travel as wanderers, whereas Scandinavians were deemed to develop an identity as a passenger if they did not come from Sjælland – it was not possible to reach Copenhagen without a boat and it was rather arduous to leave Norway without one. However, in being great travelers, Scandinavian students did not limit themselves to Copenhagen. Three medieval German universities, Rostock, Greifswald, and Frankfurt an der Oder, were more or less easily accessible from Scandinavia via the Baltic Sea. Looking at the rolls of Rostock and Greifswald, we can see that many Scandinavians made that choice.³ The epitome of these medieval peregrinationes academicae is the one of Olav Engelbrektsson. Probably from Northern Norway (his family can be located at Trondenes), he was enrolled at Rostock in 1503 and graduated from this university as a bachelor in 1505 and a master in 1507. In doing so, he was extraordinarily keen but not extraordinarily footloose. Although studying in general was an expensive and rare enterprise, we should take into account that those Scandinavians who did study in the Middle Ages took journeys of the same or even greater length for lesser academic honors. (See Fig. 1.)

Fig. 1: German university towns.

Universities in the Period of the Reformation

But why all these considerations about universities, when we see that Sweden managed to embrace the Reformation without them? Martin Luther was a professor, and the core elements of the Reformation were a mat...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Church and State
• Part II: Interaction and Networks
• Part III: Ideas and Images
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Names
• Index of Places