Hallelujahs, Damnations, or Norway's Reformation as Lengthy Process

1979 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-289
Author(s):  
K. E. Christopherson

Though one of the most Protestant nations (approximately 96 percent belong to the state Lutheran church), Norway seemingly had neither cause nor opportunity to write the history of her Reformation. For her the modern writing of history began only in the early nineteenth century, triggered by the nationalism of the Napoleonic era and the July Revolution of 1830. Lacking the Reformation era's religious polemicism, Norway produced no church historians, such as those in other countries who helped found modern historiography in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There was not even a printing press in Norway until 1643. But in 1811 Norway's first university, the present University of Oslo, was founded and soon became a center for historical research and writing. Far more important, on May 17, 1814, Norwegian representatives signed their constitution, making their land a constitutional monarchy. Precipitated by the 1814 Treaty of Kiel, which tore Norway from over four centuries of royal union with Denmark, a Napoleonic “loser,” and forced her into another ninety–year royal union with victorious Sweden, this constitution, as the only one from the revolutionary era to survive the Metternichian system, became the symbol of one of the most fervent and long-lasting displays of nationalism in modern times. This nationalism is the most important key toward understanding the writing Norwegian historians have done, or not done, about their Reformation.

1962 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giles Constable

The system of compulsory tithes in the Middle Ages has long been used by protestant and liberal historians as a stick with which to beat the medieval Church. ‘This most harassing and oppressive form of taxation’, wrote H. C. Lea in his well-known History of the Inquisition, ‘had long been the cause of incurable trouble, aggravated by the rapacity with which it was enforced, even to the pitiful collections of the gleaner’. Von Inama-Sternegg remarked on the growing hatred of tithes in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, especially among the small free landholders, ‘upon whom the burden of tithes must have fallen most heavily’. Gioacchino Volpe said that tithes were ‘the more hated because they oppressed the rich less than the poor, the dependents on seigneurial estates less than the small free proprietors to whose ruin they contributed…. At that time tithes were both an ecclesiastical and secular oppression, a double offence against religious sentiment and popular misery’. G. G. Coulton, writing before the introduction in England of an income tax at a rate of over ten per cent., proclaimed that before the Reformation tithes ‘constituted a land tax, income tax and death duty far more onerous than any known to modern times, and proportionately unpopular’.


1969 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G. Clouse

At the twelfth International Congress of the Historical Sciences there were a number of papers read on the subject of religious tolerance and heresies in modern times. Among these there were two which are of particular relevance to anyone interested in the religious thought of the Reformation Era. Professors Martin Schmidt and Gerhard Schilfert, the authors, were especially concerned with English Puritanism and its relations with continental radical ferment. Schmidt analyzed the work of Hermann Weingarten, who believed that England's century of Reformation was the seventeenth rather than the sixteenth and that it was during the struggle against the Stuarts that the history of the English church became a record of new intellectual and religious movements. Hence, the chiliastic Independents of the English Interregnum were analagous to the Anabaptists of continental fame in the early sixteenth century. In fact, during the unrest of the English Puritan Revolution, German influences presumably transmitted from the Netherlands were willingly accepted. Among the writers involved in this process were Jakob Böhme and Ludwig Friedrich Gifftheil. From these sources came the belief in the second coming of Christ which formed the unifying bond for all shades of English revolutionary Christian thought. Cromwell, himself, was deeply affected by chiliastic thought, but when he assumed political responsibility, he had to act in a more rational way. Finally the enthusiasm of the Fifth Monarchists and the Levellers subsided into the quiet mysticism of the Quakers and the natural rights position of the Age of Reason.


Author(s):  
Jacek Lorkowski ◽  
Agnieszka Jugowicz

The history of health records (later also called medical records), including ones regarding individual patients, is thousands of years old. It finds it roots in the first ancient civilisations. Up until the 19th century the records’ purpose was mainly an educational one. In the 19th and 20th century they started becoming significant in other roles as well, including those not strictly limited to medicine. In particular, to account for medical procedures, insurance proceeds or legal action. Currently we are living in a revolutionary era when it comes to health records, in which their character has changed from a “paper-based” to an electronic one. This paper presents the development of health records from the ancient to modern times, mainly in Europe and North America. Other cultures and civilisations, including China and India, are not discussed. An analysis of available sources was conducted, inter alia digital versions of manuscripts up to hundreds of years old. The analysis was based on PubMed and Google Scholar (several key words, all the available sources). Sources published in non-international languages (e.g. Dutch) were also investigated. Overall, approximately 600 articles were analysed, 158 of which were used and cited in this paper. The conclusions drawn from the analysis are as follows: (1) Health records, priorly used mostly for educational purposes, for about 100 years now have acquired a fully formal status. (2) We are currently facing the most revolutionary changes regarding the transformation of paper-based records into electronic ones. (3) The consequences of this process include systematic applications of solutions within the area of e-health, which allow us to make medical services more flexible, improve the health of individual patients and entire populations and potentially limit expenditure. (4) In the light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, introducing electronic health records could be beneficial in terms of limiting the potential sources of contamination (physical copies of health records), saving time and resources, and improving the network of communication between medical centres.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-303
Author(s):  
Tarald Rasmussen

AbstractThe Reformation came to Norway along with Danish annexation of political and ecclesiastical power. For this reason, Norwegian history writing seldom appreciated the history of the Norwegian Reformation, and preferred to look further back to the history of the Middle Ages in search of national, as well as religious, roots of Norwegian Christianity. This was already the case in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century Norwegian historical writing. In nineteenth century historical research, the strategy was underpinned by focussing on the medieval period of Christianization: Norwegian Christianity was imported from the West, from England. Here, the Pope was not at all important. Instead, some key Reformation values were addressed in a kind of “proto-Reformation” in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The King was the ruler of the church; native, Old Norse language was used and promoted; and the people (strongly) identified themselves with their religion.


Author(s):  
Andreas Stegmann

The theology of early modern Lutheranism was based on Martin Luther. From the mid-16th century to the start of the 18th, the theology developed and taught at Lutheran universities in Germany (in modern research called “Lutheran Orthodoxy”) centered on the Lutheran confession and took place within the institutional setting of church and university created by the Wittenberg Reformation. Luther’s theology was pervasive throughout early modern Lutheranism owing to basic confessional material such as the Luther Bible, Luther’s hymns, Luther’s Catechisms, Luther’s book of prayers, Luther’s liturgies, Luther’s homilies, Lutheran confessions, individual and complete editions of Luther’s works, Luther anthologies, and Luther memoria. This orientation reflects not so much an intensive preoccupation with his person and work and fundamental reflection on his authority, but rather stems from the natural presence of Luther in the Lutheran church and its theology. This reception is tangible not only in intertextual references, such as when his work is mentioned, quoted, or paraphrased, but also in the approach, completion, and content of theological thinking. Lutheran Orthodoxy continued contributing to the theological work of the Lutheran Reformation, especially in biblical exegesis, soteriology, and Christology, but also in anthropology, ecclesiology, and ethics. Although Lutheran Orthodoxy at times abbreviated or went beyond some points of Luther’s thought, resulting in a broad spectrum of diverging theological positions, it largely remained within the framework created by the Wittenberg Reformation in the 16th century. In fact, many theological initiatives of the Reformation did not come to fruition until the post-Reformation period, and many theological problems that had remained unresolved were then clarified. Hence, Lutheran Orthodoxy must be regarded as the legitimate heir and authentic interpreter of the theological legacy of the Lutheran Reformation. Because the potential of the Lutheran Reformation can be seen in Lutheran Orthodoxy, examining it can bring a fresh perspective on the history of the Reformation.


2014 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Ford

The Irish Reformation is a contentious issue, not just between Catholic and Protestant, but also within the Protestant churches, as competing Presbyterian and Anglican claims are made over the history of the Irish reformation. This chapter looks at the way in which James Seaton Reid, (1798–1851), laid claim to the Reformation for Irish Dissent in his History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. It then examines the rival Anglican histories by two High Churchmen: Richard Mant (1775–1848), Bishop of Down and Connor; and Charles Elrington, (1787–1850), the Regius Professor of Divinity in Trinity College, Dublin. It is clear that, in each case, theological and denominational conviction decisively shaped their history writing. Equally, however, significant advances were made by all three scholars in unearthing important new primary sources, and in identifying key points of controversy and debate which still represent a challenge to eccleciastical historians, of whatever denomination or none, today.


1938 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold S. Bender

The age of the Reformation, as one of the creative periods in the history of the Western church, was rich in great personalities. The challenge of the time brought some men to heroic heights, while it took scores of lesser men out of their small corners and flung them into the great stream of movement and action which was remaking the world, where they were compelled to assume places of leadership. The names, and often the life stories, of many of the characters of four hundred years ago are still familiar to us today. Some of them are household names. But there are no Anabaptist names among them, even though the Anabaptist movement represents a distinct type of continental Protestantism. Menno Simons, the sturdy leader of Dutch Mennonitism, is perhaps most widely known of the Anabaptist leaders, although the quadricentennial of his conversion from Catholicism to the Anabaptist movement, which was celebrated last year by Mennonites round the world, passed scarcely noticed. But Menno was not the founder of Anabaptism, and ten years before he appeared on the theatre of action most of the original founders and leaders of Anabaptism in its birthland in Switzerland and South Germany were numbered among the martyrs. The careers of these Swiss leaders were so short that even among their present-day Mennonite descendants most of them had been totally forgotten until they were revived in recent years by modern historical research; and today there is no living tradition attached to their names. It is true that as long ago as 1910 Adolph von Harnack could say in his History of Dogma: “Thanks to the research of recent years we have been presented with figures of splendid Christian leaders from among the circles of the Anabaptists, and many of these noble and reverend characters come nearer to us than the figures of an heroic Luther and an iron Calvin.”


1987 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 213-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah A. Rosen

Many legal scholars consider the colonial period irrelevant to the subsequent history of American law. In 1936 Roscoe Pound defined the ‘formative era’ in American law as the post-revolutionary era, and legal historians have been bound by that periodization ever since. More recently, Grant Gilmore, in his book The Ages of American Law, began his first age, the ‘age of discovery’, at approximately 1800; Gilmore claimed that American lawyers had the opportunity at that time to create an American law essentially from scratch. Morton J. Horwitz further strengthened the reigning assumptions regarding the unimportance of the legal history of colonial America in his influential book The Transformation of American Law 1780–1860. In Horwitz's view, what marks the American legal system is the instrumental use of law to promote social change, particularly to further commercial interests, and this aspect of the law did not exist until the early nineteenth century.


Urban History ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 80-89
Author(s):  
Robert Thorne

In two of its aspects the writing of architectural history has as long a pedigree as any kind of historical scholarship. In the first place, the urge to study buildings has been provoked by the sense of loss at their destruction, from the time of the Reformation onwards. The shocked response to the sight of monastic ruins was a spur to recording their past, so producing some of the earliest achievements in historical research and writing. John Aubrey's plea—‘I wished monastrys had not been putte downe, that the reformers would have been more moderate as to that point’—underlines the sentiment that led his contemporaries Sir William Dugdale and Roger Dodsworth to compile their Monasticon Anglicanum (3 Vols., 1655–73), as well as the publication of more purely architectural works such as Dugdale's History of St. Paul's Cathedral (1658) and Anthony Wood's Antiquities of Oxford (1674). Three hundred years later it is easy to observe the same kind of impulse in the countless books written from a sense of outrage at the destruction of buildings by war and redevelopment. Architectural history derives much of its energy, and its wide popularity, from the desire to preserve tangible reminders of the past.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-255
Author(s):  
Heidrun König

Abstract For sacred spaces, motion/movement means not only the takeover by other denominations, but also denominational changes, such as the Reformation. The article highlights, with varying intensity, the major movements of sacred spaces in the more than 800-year history of the present-day Evangelical Church A.C. in Romania: the Reformation, the Habsburg rule, the consequences of World War II in Northern Transylvania, and the present – with selective recourse to the tools of Memory Studies (Erinnerungsforschung), in order to trace the paradigm shift caused by the Reformation in relation to sacred space, or to evaluate the mass handover/ transfer of church buildings in Northern Transylvania in the horizon of this analysis, and concluding with a brief art-historical and even homiletic consideration.


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