Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen
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A problematic legacy
Negotiating the medieval past in Danish eighteenth-century church interiors

This chapter delves into Danish church interiors of the eighteenth century and explores how they interacted with their heritage from the Middle Ages. Many furnishings were uncontroversial in the eyes of the reformers and were hence left out of reformation debates in the sixteenth century. A resurgent disapproval of the vestiges of Catholicism can be discerned among the authorities of the eighteenth century, who wanted to combat what they perceived as old superstition and the relics of ‘popery’. The chapter points out four strategies for ‘taming’ the medieval heritage: criticizing superstitious practices, exposing superstition, explaining superstition and narrowing the focus, the last of these referring to how the focus came to rest on the key places or spaces within the church, whereas a general and gradual abandonment of decoration in church interiors became apparent.

In the eighteenth-century Danish Church, the past gradually began to pose a problem, at least to some church authorities, church owners and congregations at large. Whereas the Danish Lutheran Reformation of 1536 naturally resulted in changes inside churches, these modifications were far from thorough and far-reaching. As can be gleaned from much older research on the topic, medieval furnishings and decorations kept a strong presence within Danish churches – as they still do today, one might add. A German study edited by Johann Michael Fritz in 1997 carries the apt title Die bewahrende Kraft des Luthertums (The preserving power of Lutheranism), and in his introduction Fritz correctly points to the large amount of medieval church furniture preserved in Lutheran churches compared to the churches of other confessions.1 Indeed, many have endeavoured to explain this fact from different angles since the appearance of Die bewahrende Kraft.2 However, these pre-Reformation survivals became troublesome in the eighteenth century, as the ideals of rationalism or Enlightenment began to spread throughout the Danish realm.

This chapter delves into Danish church interiors of the eighteenth century and explores how they interacted with their heritage from the Middle Ages. Late medieval churches were diversely furnished, filled with numerous different objects more or less related to liturgy and private devotion. Many of these were uncontroversial in the eyes of the reformers and were hence left out of Reformation debates in the sixteenth century. The truly problematic items which sparked heated discussion were ultimately altars, altar furnishings and devotional art at large – particularly images on altars and images connected with specific acts of veneration.

A resurgent disapproval of the vestiges of Catholicism can in other words be discerned among the authorities of the eighteenth century, who wanted to combat what they perceived as old superstition and the relics of ‘popery’, which threatened to contaminate weak minds and pollute the evangelical message. By way of tracts and actual refurnishing of parish churches, several campaigns led by theologians and church owners were set in motion with a view to adapting the church building as well as its rituals to prevailing ideas of rational thinking.

It should be stated from the outset that this eagerness for reform was by no means a universally accepted attitude or interest. Rather, the preoccupation with the purging of the churches was carried through by zealous individuals or clusters of communities spread all over the country. Furthermore, economic and regional factors influenced this otherwise strictly theological issue, as the most widespread renovation and refurnishing work implemented during the eighteenth century often took place in such prosperous parts of the country as eastern Jutland and the islands of Funen and Zealand. Theology was certainly a prominent motivational force for the renewal of church interiors; but a better-performing economy also enabled church owners to follow the artistic fashions of the period much more closely than in other parts of the country, where fists were necessarily tighter. There were undoubtedly ideals behind most renewals; but as we shall see, we also find voices explicitly proclaiming their ideology in areas where otherwise little change was set in motion in churches because of a lack of funds.

Present-day scholarship has access to records of many eighteenth-century reactions to the medieval heritage, and a number of different strategies for dealing with the past can be discerned among them. In the following, I shall try to demonstrate some of these strategies through a number of small case studies where their implications will be pointed out and discussed. The case studies should be compared with the strikingly similar findings of Terese Zachrisson in her chapter in this volume on religious material culture in Sweden. However, before I embark on the case studies, a few general words need to be said about Danish churches in the first centuries after the evangelical Reformation of 1536.

Some notes on the Reformation of Danish churches

While the Lutheran reformers of the sixteenth century specifically changed the status of the religious image, they also changed the perception of church furnishings and devotional objects, such as three-dimensional sculptures that had been in place prior to the Reformation. Some were removed from altars and preserved as so-called Gedenkbilder; some were destroyed, altered or adjusted; others were left in place; and some came to be integrated into new ritual and devotional contexts.3 In his handbook from the middle of the sixteenth century concerning the visitation of churches, the Danish superintendent Peter Palladius (1503–1560) could suggest:

That is why churchwardens can dismantle these [side altars] … The retables and images can be put up on the wall [elsewhere in the church]. When people know whom they depict, they may use them as mirrors [i.e. examples of pious living].4

The immediate need was to stop the previous devotional and liturgical activities practised in churches, and one of the ways of doing so was to remove or reposition the objects which had traditionally been used in worship, thereby disrupting the association between object and ritual. Altarpieces displaying saints as the primary motif were often removed from altars and the altars themselves broken up and taken away or repurposed, while other liturgical equipment, such as censers, were put to different uses. In this context, it is important to note that most of these changes applied to side altars found in the nave and chapels attached to the churches; the decoration on the high altar in the chancel would mostly be left untouched because the altarpiece here usually had the crucifixion or the Passion story as the central theme, and this was, according to Luther and most of his followers, unproblematic. Nevertheless, not all altarpieces portraying the Passion embodied a solely Christological iconography: Mariological as well as hagiographical themes could be intertwined in the composition of a retable, the consequence being, in principle, that unwanted content was at times left on the altar as vestiges of outmoded beliefs. To this we may add the wall-paintings and stained-glass windows which all carried pre-Reformation imagery but were rarely the objects of direct veneration and accordingly mostly left untouched and unmentioned by reformers. The superintendent Jacob Madsen (1538–1606), visiting the churches on the island of Funen during the last decade of the sixteenth century, almost exclusively mentions altar decorations in his visitation reports; Madsen is more or less silent about all the other paraphernalia and imagery in the churches he visited, because he simply found them of little consequence.5

What we are to take from all this is that a substantial number of medieval church furnishings and decorations were left inside churches following the Reformation – not always in their originally designated places, but still visible and, at times, also still in use. While the alteration of altar decorations and liturgical equipment was certainly an expression of an iconoclastic approach to the Reformation of the church space, it was a very moderate one, as a substantial amount of pre-Reformation devotional art was left visible.6 All of this led to an intricate and highly variable pattern of attitudes within the Lutheran sphere, a pattern which not only changed from one church region to another but also from church to church in neighbouring parishes. Time and time again, it sparked renewed discussion of the harmful nature of pre-Reformation or Catholic images and the status of church furnishings in general. Not until the Evangelical-Lutheran Church was able to settle on the concept of adiaphora after the discussions in the Colloquy of Montbéliard (1586) did the debate more or less end, and it was now – within certain boundaries – left to individual interpretation to choose which images and types of objects were proper to have and not to have.7 We can also see the discussion about adiaphora in the Lutheran community as a way of coming to terms with aspects of the pre-Reformation past. During the latter part of the sixteenth century and particularly in the seventeenth century, in what is often named the period of Lutheran orthodoxy, new furnishings came into Danish churches – particularly new altarpieces and pulpits, but also wall-paintings and numerous other types of objects. While this probably led to the complete removal of medieval objects in many places, these new installations often seem simply to have been added on, like the rings of a tree, another chronological period joining the steadily growing number of images and objects inside the churches.

This brings us to the situation which church owners and authorities faced in the eighteenth century, when the revolutionary ideals of Enlightenment and rationalism sparked an urge to clear the house of God and unsentimentally recreate it without what was felt to be the superstition and unenlightened clutter of past centuries. As we shall see, the ultimate aim was to reinstate conditions like those in the early Church of late Antiquity; but this dream rarely came to fruition, and where it succeeded the changes were almost always rolled back during the nineteenth century, when the aesthetic ideals of the Enlightenment reformers had more or less lost their appeal.

For many hectic decades following the Reformation, the Danish Crown sold or gave the rights and control over most parish churches to the nobility, who regarded the churches – or rather the tithes – as a steady source of income. In principle, church owners could do what they wanted with their churches as long as the buildings were kept in good repair and the necessary services were provided to the community. This could at times give rise to conflict when too little care was shown in the maintenance of the buildings. Financial, nostalgic and devotional interests were all blended with the use and perception of the church, and it was by no means always easy simply to purge it of all previous furnishings and install new ones in tune with new ideals, if the owner wished to do so.8 I will therefore turn to a number of case studies showing how this problem of the presence of the medieval past was handled within some rural parishes.

The first case: criticizing superstitious practices

The first case takes us to Krogstrup on the island of Zealand. In the rural parish church there, a shrine was in all likelihood established at some point during the late Middle Ages in honour of St Denis or Dionysius of Paris.9 We have no medieval sources confirming the existence of the cult; but as we shall see, the afterlife of this veneration makes it likely that the shrine became a popular pilgrimage site in the region around the early sixteenth century, and a centre to which rural people from nearby villages would travel in order to find cures for their ailments. We know little about this cult of St Dionysius except that the depiction of the saint was probably on display in a chapel added to the church around 1500 and specifically designated for this purpose. Many such shrines dotted the sacred topography of late medieval Denmark, but what is particularly interesting in the present context is the post-Reformation survival of devotion to the saint.10 After the Reformation, we hear of this cult in 1606 when King Christian IV ordered the chapel to be cleared and the image of St Dionysius taken down and removed owing to the blasphemous adoration of this effigy.11

As far as we know, the chapel was duly cleared in accordance with the King’s command. Only the royal decree has been preserved, and no response that might have confirmed the intervention which the local authorities were to perform in the church. It seems fair to assume that the orders were indeed carried out, and one would think that the veneration displayed at Krogstrup was eradicated as a result. However, this was not the case. In 1764 Bishop Erik Pontoppidan, whom we shall meet again shortly, could report that owing to old superstitious practices, peasants from the region around Krogstrup were travelling to the church or sending couriers with money for the alms box, when their children had fallen seriously ill or women experienced trouble during pregnancy.12 The church of Krogstrup was hence still a place to which one could turn in order to seek cures and succour more than two hundred years after the Reformation. St Dionysius himself in all likelihood disappeared in 1606, but the place retained his healing functions. Rather than donating alms specifically to the saint, as would have been done in the late Middle Ages, the focus was shifted to the church building as a space which was believed to possess special, blessed powers. King Christian’s order to remove the saint was successful insofar as it rendered the cult surrounding the church of Krogstrup faceless – it was no longer to a specific entity that the peasants travelled – but the cult itself remained active and transformed itself according to post-Reformation conditions.

In Store Heddinge Church, also on Zealand, the pastor complained that parishioners sought the help of a figure of the Virgin Mary with her child kept in the church, as well as of a crucifix hanging by the entrance, which the peasants sought out to counter toothaches and difficulties during pregnancy. On 6 January 1787 he was given permission by Bishop Nicolai Edinger Balle (1744–1816), of whom more below, to take down the medieval sculptures and burn them, with the addendum that a matching amount of firewood should be given to the needy in the parish.13 We have many such instances recorded from the eighteenth century, testifying to the fact that communities retained certain practical attitudes to the past as a means of finding help which was otherwise not to be had in their community, and in a sense they thereby kept some ownership of their past and religion. Yet this was clearly unwanted from the outset of the Reformation, and downright embarrassing to many authorities in the eighteenth century who felt as alienated from the practices of rural communities as they probably did from the urban and intellectual spheres that promoted the new ideals of the time.

There is a ritual aspect to such ceremonial destruction of the past, an aspect to which I shall return in the next case. However, what we should note here is the attempt to establish order or to better the community through acts of simple destruction. Such attitudes bring out the charged nature of these acts of damnatio memoriae and the forces that the agents of Enlightenment confronted in their zeal.14 The result, as the case of Krogstrup demonstrates, was far from always successful, as it was simply the exterior or surface of the practice that was eliminated, not the need that fuelled the undesirable devotions in the church. While we should perhaps be wary of reading the cult at Krogstrup as a direct continuation of late medieval practice, we may see it as an expression of a traditional religion which again and again clashed with the expectations of church authorities, first with Lutheran orthodoxy and then again with the idealism of Enlightenment. As a coping strategy, the destruction of the deprecated objects should furthermore be considered the first and oldest of the strategies presented here and an expedient reaching back to the Reformation debates of the sixteenth century.

The second case: exposing superstition

The second case also involves a cult of St Dionysius. This time we have moved to a rural parish church in western Jutland, a rather poor region in medieval and early modern Denmark with limited farming possibilities. Yet here we find the rural church of Ejsing, which was much enlarged during the late Middle Ages.15 The church thereby became a substantial regional landmark by rural standards and especially so for a church in western Jutland. Among the additions to the fabric was a chapel which was in all likelihood dedicated to the cult of St Dionysius, and we should undoubtedly envision activities taking place here that were very similar to those presented in connection with the church of Krogstrup. However, one big difference sets Krogstrup and Ejsing apart. Instead of being eradicated, the saints’ cult at Ejsing was ‘exposed as superstition’. The figure of St Dionysius was not removed, but retained on display in the church. The effigy was moved from the dismantled altar and placed in front of its former chapel, positioned for all to see, with the following text (rhymed in the original Danish) written above it:

This chapel, one here sees, in the days of the Pope was where Dionysius and others were the teachers. From him [St Dionysius] it has its name from ancient times. Now it [the chapel] has found better use and he is here no more located. As a mark of worship a little altar of stone was once erected here. On this lurked without flesh and bones this wooden monk [the effigy of St Dionysius] who has [now] been removed.16

According to the inscription, which was made in 1671, the reason for the removal of the altar was that the chapel was to be cleared and used for burials. The proceedings were, of course, very early in the light of the chronological scope of this chapter; but they are relevant because this is one of the first salient examples of dealing with the medieval past in such a manner. The interesting thing in this connection is the strange paradox of the commemoration itself. The statue of St Dionysius was placed on the wall along with the text, which exposes and disempowers the saint while demonstrating his redundancy to the community. First of all, this is a clear break with the ideas of both Luther and Superintendent Peder Palladius (1503–1560), who regarded the potential of these depictions of saints as favourable influences on the congregation. Here the reverse is the case, and we are told that the saint belongs to the unenlightened past. But to my mind a curious or ambivalent quality creeps into the process as well: by putting the saint on display in the church in such a prominent way, the exact opposite is also happening. The saint’s power seems reconfirmed and his place in the community is upheld, despite now being almost put in the pillory within the church, which again points to the extremely charged nature of these interactions with the past. We have no records of the cult of St Dionysius at Ejsing, neither in the Middle Ages nor after the Reformation, but the memory of his cult was nevertheless secured through the attempts made by the churchwardens to expose it.

A less striking but parallel example concerns the church of Vindinge on the island of Funen, where we find an interesting note in the topographical survey Den Danske Atlas (The Danish Atlas), published between 1763 and 1781. In the description of the church, we read that the altarpiece was at some point replaced or perhaps merely altered, but on the retable present in the middle of the eighteenth century a text was written, stating that ‘[h]ere was St Matthew shown on the altar’.17 Again, we encounter the curious dual movement of simultaneously commemorating the presence and the abolition of the saint. This phenomenon certainly smacks of an elitist approach to the betterment of the congregation, who could hardly be expected to follow the rhetorical strategy in play here. As I shall show below, the strategy of ridicule also posed the danger of further alienating the rural faithful, who would not necessarily be party to it. The rhetoric could be counterproductive to the message.

The third case: explaining superstition

In 1765, Ditlev Mortensen Kirketerp (1734–1792) bought an obsolete altarpiece, produced c. 1500, from the large late medieval church of St Morten in the town of Randers in eastern Jutland.18 On the retable we see the Mercy Seat depicted in the middle, flanked by the Virgin with child and St Martin of Tours, while saints are portrayed on the wings of the piece. Kirketerp had the retable installed on the altar of the rural parish church of Hald, also in eastern Jutland, which he owned. However, before he had the piece placed on the altar, he equipped it with new rhymed inscriptions in Danish underneath the central images – images which can only be seen as traditional late medieval motifs, and which would have had unquestionable Catholic connotations in 1765. Beneath the Virgin, the new text reads: ‘Mary does not hear our prayer / we only adore her Son’,19 and under the Mercy Seat we read: ‘We honour the invisible God / images we can do without’20, while the text beneath St Martin reads: ‘St Martin’s image may stand here / [but] we build on the words of the apostles’.21

Two things are striking in this context. First and foremost, it is remarkable that the church owner, Kirketerp, bought and installed the altarpiece in his church only to have the very images he was putting on display countered through the added inscriptions. It should be stressed that the retable is a very fine piece and certainly a valuable object from the final decades prior to the Reformation, but it very obviously belongs to a wholly different religious sphere. We thus get a sense of the church owner negotiating with himself. On the one hand, he must have been taken with the sheer quality of the work and therefore found it fitting for his parish church; on the other, it clearly was a disturbing piece which had to be disarmed somehow. As we have seen, Luther was of the opinion that a church might harbour images if such were needed, but preferably there should not be any. Kirketerp was clearly of a different opinion, finding it better to have the old medieval retable on show rather than displaying something else or nothing at all. In other words, he preferred a spectacular medieval altarpiece to anything new that had been created specifically for the building. We do not know what he paid for the retable; it might have been cheap, but the purchase still points to the growing veneration of old precious objects from the pre-Reformation period which became increasingly evident during the latter half of the eighteenth century. One may, for instance, note a similar regard for the rich alabaster retables from the early fifteenth century found in the churches of Borbjerg and Vejrum in western Jutland, as well as numerous other similar cases which show how the sheer age of the objects began to modify their essence from highly charged Catholic instruments into historical relics.22 Consequently, we observe how Enlightenment ideals fostered the budding antiquarianism which allowed for a preoccupation with the medieval past in a secularized manner, the objects being transformed from charged and religiously dangerous idols into historical curiosities.23 This is clearly the case with the two above-mentioned alabaster pieces; but in Hald, there is still a sense of danger attached to the retable. It retained some of its power, a power which needed to be curbed lest the parishioners should be misled by the beauty and material wealth of the piece – its aesthetic qualities clearly being the reason why Kirketerp put it in his church in the first place.

This brings me to my second point. The added inscriptions, unlike the inscription at Ejsing, do not mock the images but rather take a different approach. They teach the reader how to understand them, so that the altarpiece in a contradictory way makes itself obsolete by stating that the congregation should have no use for it. Still, it is here and it is put in the role of the teacher, instructing the beholder what to think of itself as an image in the church by pointing to its nature as a mere depiction and nothing divine. Placing didactic inscriptions on objects in order to explain their proper use or meaning was a strategy which quickly spread during the decades following the Reformation.24 One might think of the altar in Svindinge Church, dating from 1578, on the island of Funen, which explains what the altar is not but completely fails to explain what it is and why it is there.25 On one side of the altar, for instance, we read: ‘I desire loving-kindness and not sacrifice, [as well as] knowledge of God and not burnt offerings’;26 but if the altar is not for sacrifice, what is it for? On this question the inscriptions are silent. We could similarly turn to a small group of chalices, also found on Funen, where we find the following inscription: ‘I am to be used in the manner of Christ, and not according to the Pope’s erroneous teaching’.27 These words are inscribed on a chalice from 1634 in the small rural church of Bjerreby.

Such convoluted rhetorical manoeuvring was clearly a part of what has been called the process of confessionalization after the reformations, yet this didactic approach became ever more common during the eighteenth century in the slipstream generated by the spread of Enlightenment ideals. It was a tool employed by the authorities to reduce and reshape what were perceived as lax attitudes among the primarily rural congregations. While the pastor could explain the content and nature of the church through his sermons and theological writings, the very objects within the church buildings could also be given a voice and in a sense speak directly to both their user and an audience, as when, in 1736, the new pulpit in the town church of Elsinore on Zealand was inscribed, on the steps leading up to the podium (again, the original is in rhyme): ‘Two hundred years in time / it is now in Denmark, since / we escaped from monkish ways / and found the true faith’.28 The inscription, of course, first and foremost commemorates the bicentennial of the Danish Reformation; but it also feeds into the idea of the objects in the church as having a voice of their own, addressing their pre-Reformation counterparts and explaining that they are better and different, just as the pulpit here clearly states that something new is now preached in this church. Like the attempt to remove specific, troublesome objects (as in the first case), this way of giving a voice to the church interior was among the oldest strategies for handling the past, and it is noteworthy that the Enlightenment attempts at explaining what was the proper use of, say, a chalice – attempts intended to discredit old beliefs and so-called superstitions – in many cases produced a different effect, leading to the preservation of troublesome objects which might otherwise have been peremptorily discarded because of their medieval origins.

The fourth case: narrowing the focus

In this last case, I want to point out a specific tendency in eighteenth-century church decoration rather than discussing a particular church. If we take a step back and look at developments in church decoration from the seventeenth century and into the late eighteenth century, a shift becomes clear. At the beginning of this period, the amount and fullness, or elaboration, of church furnishings was increasing, church spaces being filled with compact expressions of Baroque material splendour. Materiality came to be the crucial element when giving expression to notions of sanctity, sacred presence or transcendence.29 During the seventeenth century, in other words, the size, volume or sheer material presence in churches became a way, through a form of non-iconography, to express what the late medieval period prior to the reformations of the sixteenth century could show through, for instance, specific depictions of the sacred. The sacred was now to be an abstract presence, felt through the very abundance of matter in the churches – richly carved retables, extremely ornate pulpits and huge sepulchral tablets, to name but the most obvious elements. While this idea remained strong up until the late seventeenth century, it changed during the 1700s in the course of what might be called a narrowing of focus. Rather than artistic emphasis on the whole of the church, the focus came to rest on the key places or spaces within the church – the baptismal font, altar and pulpit – whereas a gradual abandonment of the decoration of the church interior in general became apparent. That is not to say that a growing carelessness was setting in, but rather that attention was concentrated on the places in the church which held the greater theological importance. It might be said that by not demonstrating the same degree of care and splendour, the places which did receive attention would then stand out more clearly to the beholder.

An example of this development is the fragmented mural decoration in the parish church of Greve on Zealand, dating from around 1700.30 Here the walls and vaults were whitewashed and then painted with angels blowing horns and carrying palm leaves. The painting was executed in grisaille and was remarkably simple, considering the dense colours usually employed up until this point. Compared to previous modes of wall-painting, a certain sense of the understated could be detected at Greve, which then again would enable the gilded pulpit of 1617 and the now lost altarpiece of 1619 to stand out in the interior.31 To take a better preserved but somewhat less striking example, one could look at the large painted drapery surrounding the altar and altarpiece in Magleby Church, also on Zealand, painted c. 1750–1775.32

The delicacy which these artistic representations express, compared to the same type of art from the middle of the previous century, can be illustrated by the church of Mary Magdalene in eastern Jutland. Here the church received a remarkable altarpiece in 1757, commemorating the church owner Jørgen Fogh Wilster (1714–1756) and donated by his widow Anne Margrethe Galten (1730–1797).33 The splendid retable is a Rococo-style altarpiece with a highly stylish frame incorporating typical period ornament, framing a Last Supper scene. On the flanks of the retable Christ and Moses are carved as three-dimensional sculptures, while the top-piece is crowned by a putto sitting above the Jahve name written in Hebrew. The retable is a lush vista of gold and rich sculptural carving, with an expressive use of forms that seem to bulge out into the space of the chancel, yet retaining a sense of a slim and upward-pointing whole. The effect is a strong focal point in the church, comprised of elements from different periods and without any sense of strict unity. Nonetheless, in the chancel the altarpiece outshines the other elements and becomes the central and most splendid part of the church.

In light of the theme under consideration, these changes serve to demonstrate the ways in which the authorities tried to refocus the church interior and cleanse it of the most troubling elements from the past. They form a gradual movement; its thinking is very much rooted in the recurrence of pleasure in materiality and splendour that arose during the seventeenth century.

The past as a problem

The powerful polemical denunciations of the cult of saints and everything ‘popish’ that characterized the sixteenth century still lingered as relevant objections in the Lutheran community in the eighteenth. They were gradually reactivated as arguments for a reform of the Church, not solely to remove it from previous superstition but also to wrest it free of the most cumbersome elements of the Lutheran past and attune the church building and its rituals to the present. With renewed force, the Middle Ages came to be a symbol of all that should be left behind; and to many leading intellectual figures of the time, the ghost of the pre-Reformation age – or what became the Catholic past – always loomed as a threat to the religious hegemony of the realm. Over time, a change is nevertheless apparent in the way the medieval heritage was addressed. Whereas the rhetoric of the 1500s and 1600s directly influenced the Reformation and the ensuing consolidation of a confessional identity in the Lutheran sphere, we find a somewhat different line of thought in the 1700s.34 Here the medieval Church and all its ritual trappings were clearly becoming a thing of the past, with only vestiges left, as can be seen from the case studies above. These vestiges, however, were still regarded as troublesome symbols by pastors and learned scholars writing about the great superstition which, they felt, still beset the ‘simple people’, especially in the countryside.35 As pastor Frederik Christian Hjort (1760–1820) notes in his fascinating treatise on religion among the peasantry:

I venture to say that the true religion of the heart is all too rare among the peasantry; the outwardly apparently good deeds found among them are more often fruits of a hope for favours in return than a truthful and living acknowledgement of obligations, which should always, after all, be the force impelling the true Christian to practise [Christian] virtues.36

The dichotomy between learned and urban culture on the one hand and the rural communities on the other was felt, by some at least, to be a wide and unacceptable gap which could only be bridged through the stern enlightenment of the unlearned.37 A prime example of this, writing on the very cusp of the rationalistic Enlightenment movement in Denmark, would be the already-mentioned Erik Pontoppidan, bishop of the Diocese of Bergen in Norway, who published a small treatise against superstition in Latin entitled Everriculum fermenti veteris in 1736.38 The title of the work, in translation, means ‘Broom to remove the old sourdough’, and the metaphor signifies that all ancient superstition should be swept out of the Church. In his work, Pontoppidan states:

I am somewhat in doubt if I, in this age of superstition, should be surprised by the practical character of the vices or their great age. We are positioned as the complete heirs of the Papists and the Papists of the Pharisees, because one should not believe that this has come into being yesterday or the day before.39

What Pontoppidan does here is to trace a lineage of superstition running from his day through the Middle Ages and back to biblical times, whereupon he blames the Jews for being at the root of much of it.40 In addition, he defines everything between the Bible and Luther as a dark age of misguided effort and pure invention, thereby attempting to remove any quality of ‘true religion’ from both Catholicism and Judaism. A similar rhetoric is found among many of the Lutheran theologians who wrote during the following decades as Enlightenment ideas were spreading, primarily from Copenhagen, to pastors and manor houses throughout the country. And as we have seen, one of the agendas clearly was to emasculate the authority of the past by moving the conversation from religion and into the realm of folk magic and superstition.41

What further complicates the matter is that the strict opposition between learned elite and unlearned rustics was to a certain degree an old trope in theological thinking, and it was by no means only made popular again by the reformers of the eighteenth century. To supply just two examples countering the idea of a vast, utterly unlearned rural population in need of enlightenment, we can first note how the rural parish church of Snesere on Zealand received a new altarpiece in 1728 as a replacement for a medieval retable. The reason for this exchange is said to be that the altarpiece was ‘replaced not only owing to [its] fragility, but also because of the many images standing upon it to the indignation of the congregation’.42 Here we get a sense that the process of renovation within the church, and the discarding of the medieval altarpiece, was not just a top-down process but one supported by at least a number of parishioners. Resistance to, as well as support of, change and Enlightenment could, in other words, be found on all levels in some communities. A second example, again from Zealand, illustrates the same thing. Here, Bishop Nicolai Edinger Balle makes an interesting comment in the records of his 1786 visitation of the rural parish of Spjellerup, where he was to examine the congregation in matters of faith. An added interest was that Henrik Paulin Sandal (1751–1833) was present during the visitation. Sandal was the author of at least two books critical of the lack of learning among the peasantry, and in particular he wrote a small book questioning whether Luther’s Small Catechism was a useful tool in the education of the young.43 Much to Bishop Balle’s delight, Sandal afterwards congratulated him and told him that he had certainly managed to educate his parishioners into more than ‘babble-machines’ (Plapper-Maskiner). While grateful, the bishop rather wryly closes his comment on the episode by stating:

when the mighty Enlighteners themselves would come out and take in the so-called Egyptian Darkness, which they find themselves obligated to banish through illumination, even by the use of thunder and lightning, the tune might get another sound, or they might perhaps be silent, which perhaps would be for the better.44

It is to be noted that Bishop Balle acknowledged the timeliness of reforms within the Church, but he was by no means a radical, and he felt the need to stay in touch with traditions within the Lutheran Church.45 His flippant remark about Sandal is no surprise, but what is noteworthy in the present context is the fact that the farmers at Spjellerup were given good marks by both the bishop and the reformer. All was not ‘Egyptian Darkness’, and to a certain extent the learned theologians thundering from Copenhagen about the beliefs of the rural population were pushing at an open door. We should consequently be careful about following the seminal conclusions by Robert W. Scribner too closely; Scribner saw the eighteenth century as exactly the type of religious battleground that the reformers of the period envisioned themselves as entrenched in.46 Things were much more muddled than Scribner made them seem. Not only had changes spurred by agents of the Enlightenment gained supporters in the countryside, too; all the arguments and strategies had, as we have seen in the case studies, roots going back to the Reformation in the sixteenth century.

While the sharp pens of pastors and scholars poked fun at Catholic religion and peasant beliefs, the effect of their joint efforts was probably limited. Indeed, if we look at the arguments formulated by the second half of the nineteenth century, hands-on devotion or liturgical veneration of, for instance, saints was out of the question; but the saints as exemplary individuals were still understood as an expression of the profound piety of the Middle Ages, and in particular the piety of the laity, not the clergy. What the theologians of the later decades of the 1700s mockingly defined as peasant superstition could thus in the early nineteenth century be interpreted by such extremely influential theologians as N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872) as an expression of the pure, honest faith of ordinary parishioners, who were far removed from the intellectual, theological movers and shakers who came and went over time.47 In other words, the medieval past seemingly went on offering something to the community, or filled a devotional void in the congregation, during both the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries; some would argue that it still does.48

As was stated at the beginning of this chapter, the changes set in motion through the ideas and agents of the Enlightenment were regionally scattered and often driven by individuals or small groups. While my case studies have primarily dealt with the reaction against these new ideals, it should not be forgotten that in many places changes were accepted, and at times accepted eagerly. Reactions to the Enlightenment ideals were by no means uniform, which is probably why much was accepted but still more was quickly rejected. At least, the most radical ideas of change regarding the furnishing of churches and the liturgy were rapidly abandoned.49 Today, it may be difficult to fully appreciate what the reformers of the eighteenth century saw as the perfect or model church, because most of the changes that came about during their century disappeared again in the 1800s. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile mentioning some of the most striking features in these reforms, as they show how different an Enlightenment vision of a church interior was from the traditional parish church with its assemblage of medieval and early modern furnishings and decorations.

How, then, did the reformers envisage their new churches without the fetters of the medieval past? As discussed in the fourth case above, there was an ambition to clear the church in order to make space for the primary functions of the Eucharist, the sermon and baptism. These changes were all quickened by a wish for liturgical reform. Not all the changes happening within the churches were directly related to the new liturgical developments, but where these ideas were implemented, changes to the layout of the building became necessary. Of the changes in the liturgy, the most important for the church interior as a whole was the wish that the pastor should conduct the service facing the congregation. Most medieval high altars had been moved up against the east wall of the chancel at some point prior to the Reformation, making it impossible for anyone to stand behind the altar and face the congregation.50 Furthermore, altarpieces would make such a position on the part of the priest or pastor impossible in almost all churches. One of the strong reformatory voices, Peter Christian Steenvinkel (1742–1799), in his brief pamphlet Forslag og Ønsker om en Forbedring i det udvortes af Gudstjenesten (‘Suggestions and wishes for the improvement of the outer aspects of the service’) of 1785, thus argued for free-standing altars or even mobile altar tables like those found in the Calvinist tradition. This necessitated drastic changes in the furnishings of the chancel.51 The medieval altar had to be removed along with its altar decorations and everything else blocking the line of sight, or making it difficult for the congregation to gather for the Eucharist during the service. This change was without a doubt the most important of Steenvinkel’s recommendations, but other changes followed this rethinking of the chancel. He of course urged that all obsolete objects without any function should be removed from the building. The clear target was first and foremost medieval furnishings, which had no place in a modern house of worship; but he was equally critical of confessionals and memorial tablets from the seventeenth century, along with chancel screens and other trappings belonging to prior centuries. Just as in Sweden, the ideal was a whitewashed, well-lit interior with only one interesting attempt at a sense of staging. Steenvinkel suggested that it should be possible to dim the lighting through drapes during the Eucharist in order to create a ‘pious atmosphere’ parallel to what he believed prevailed in the early Church. The idea that dimming the light would bring the church interior into touch with the first Christian communities is of course in highly questionable in a factual sense, but it is noteworthy that he felt the need to have something which could appeal to the senses on a mystical level, which was otherwise exactly what the reformers of the century were opposing. It is also noteworthy that Steenvinkel thereby makes the same rhetorical stride as Pontoppidan does in his Everriculum fermenti veteris by bridging the medieval period and attuning the contemporary Church with late Antiquity, thus suppressing everything in between.

Such reforming ideals were followed throughout the country; yet, as we have seen, in many places the changes were quickly erased during the second half of the nineteenth century.52 On Funen, for instance, Baroness Constance Frederikke Henriette of Gyldensteen (1772–1827) had the churches in her possession altered according to some of these ideals during the first decade of the 1800s. This meant a whitening of the walls, new altarpieces (the altars in these cases not being moved) and the insertion of new, large windows along with a re-colouring of the interior in lighter shades. Once renovated, her churches must have looked strikingly different from what they presented before the changes were set in motion.53

An example of how this trend developed even further was the manner in which the temple architecture of Classicism filtered into the new churches during the late eighteenth century.54 Here the idea of narrowing the focus to the few specific points in the church that were of particular importance becomes even more evident and indeed striking. At that stage, the trends discussed here had perhaps also reached a point where the effect began to alienate rather than captivate the viewer or congregation. At least, the strict ideals of Classicism never gained a proper foothold in the Danish Church, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the style was heavily censured. Christian Molbech (1783–1857), an esteemed antiquarian and scholar of the period, famously wrote in a commentary on contemporary church architecture in 1855: ‘One cannot in this day and age, neither in the North nor in the South, worship God in Greek temples or live in Pompeian houses’.55 To Molbech, the idea of a Christian service in a building shaped like the pagan temples of Antiquity was an absurdity, especially in the north. To him and many others at this time, the aesthetic ideals of Enlightenment had failed completely in the matter of church furnishing and ecclesiastical architecture, resulting in a distancing from the qualities which nurtured the piety and devotion of the congregation.

The development of the Protestant confessions and the dismissal of medieval religion have often been interpreted as paving the way for the secularization of Western culture in general.56 While this may or may not have been the case, it is worth noting how, for instance, the renewed harsh stance towards the cultic practices of the past during the eighteenth century softened in the 1800s. To the Lutherans of the late nineteenth century, romantic notions about the medieval past enabled them to be in touch with a spirituality that extended the range of devotional culture, and they facilitated the potential for the experience of an almost mystical bond across time within the community. As has been pointed out, the theologians of the Enlightenment reacted strongly against such ideas; but even in the midst of what can only be described as a clear-cut rationalistic Protestant or Lutheran dismissal of everything that was not tied to what Berndt Hamm would call the normative centre of faith, Bishop Pontoppidan nonetheless states in his introduction to the Everriculum:

But guard yourself from believing that we here intend to bring to light and expose to laughter all of those things, each and every one, which smack of the sourdough of either heathendom or Papism, and which would stir nausea and soon give rise to worry in every just judge of evangelical purity. There are things which a not unreasonable piety of today would argue are better covered by the cloak of love and kindness than exposed and shattered.57

While the presence of the medieval past within the eighteenth-century context can help us understand the degree of fluidity in religious identities beneath the surface of seemingly firmly set beliefs, we must also be aware of the process of translation that made the past available to a Lutheran present. As was noted in the case studies, authorities were keen to dismiss any ‘popery’ while still accepting the medieval past into their churches, often in the guise of figures of saints. What they in effect did was to ‘evangelize’ the past, often encapsulated in the figured saint. They discarded all previous ideas of liturgical veneration and, most importantly, cut all ties between these relics from the past and any notion of what was deemed serious religion. And because the past was retained, it kept a voice and a poetic and very ‘irrational’ presence which the Enlightenment, however strongly it tried, could not replace.

Conclusion

Most of the strategies for coping with the medieval past presented here testify to the fact that it could be ridiculed and devalued, but still kept its presence and seemed to offer something to the community. While the agents of Enlightenment could record with horror the religious misdemeanours of the rural population, their attempts to change the setting for religion were, in the end, unsuccessful. They could change rituals and wordings, but the actual church building in a sense resisted change. The reasons for this are manifold; but one of the most important is without a doubt what Bishop Erik Pontoppidan observed, namely that religion always borders on the irrational and mystical, no matter what words are employed to explain it. Max Weber famously wrote about the disenchantment of the world and the resilient poetic formulae employed to explain what is difficult to express.58 In that sense one could argue that the eighteenth century began to reformulate the medieval past into a poetic symbol which came to represent ideals of devout piety and truthful, inner spirituality. This, at least, was the dialectic response to the enlightened attempts at purifying both the church buildings and religion as such during the late eighteenth century.

The Romantic movement, so closely connected to concepts of rationalism, seized upon this poetic potential in the past and emphasized it, yet never or at least only very rarely turned to actual medieval or Catholic practices within the Church. The Middle Ages were kept as a symbol, becoming a guiding light in attempts to counter the changes set in motion by the reformers of the eighteenth century. Thus, many of the church renovations executed during the late 1700s and the early 1800s lost their appeal with noteworthy speed and came to be replaced with church furnishings, colours and materials much more closely aligned with romantic notions of the past. When looking at Danish churches today, we may note that the reformers of the eighteenth century won victories and accomplished some of their aims, but in the end their project failed because ultimately the past could not be rationalized or replaced. The Middle Ages kept returning, perhaps not in exactly the same guise, but they remained a presence and are still felt when we enter most rural parish churches today.

I am grateful for the advice and suggestions of my colleague Birgitte Bøggild Johannsen, who has made her as-yet-unpublished material available to me. Her publication on the subject at hand is eagerly anticipated.
2 See such works as Sergiusz Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts: The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1993); Peter Poscharsky, Die Bilder in den lutherischen Kirchen: Ikonographische Studien (Munich: Scaneg, 1998); Bridget Heal, ‘“Better Papist than Calvinist”: art and identity in later Lutheran Germany’, German History, 29 (2011), 584–609; Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen, Ritual and Art across the Danish Reformation: Changing Interiors of Village Churches, 1450–1600 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018); Justin Kroesen, ‘The survival of medieval furnishings in Lutheran churches: notes towards a comparison between Germany and Scandinavia’, ICO: Iconographisk Post, 3–4 (2018), 4–39.
3 Caroline Bynum, ‘Are things “indifferent”? How objects change our understanding of religious history’, German History, 34:1 (2016), 88112; Jürgensen, Ritual.
4 Lis Jacobsen (ed.), Peder Palladius’ Danske Skrifter, 5 vols (Copenhagen: Thiele, 1911–1926), V (1925–1926), p. 36. Translations throughout the chapter are mine.
5 A. R. Idum (ed.), Den fyenske Biskop Mester Jacob Madsens Visitatsbog (Odense: Historisk Samfund for Odense og Assens Amter, 1929).
6 Fritz, Die bewahrende; Jürgensen, Ritual. See, furthermore, Anita Hansen and Birgitte Bøggild Johannsen, ‘Imo licet: Omkring Niels Hemmingsens billedsyn’, in Peter Sjömar and others (eds), Kirkearkeologi og kirkekunst: Studier tilegnet Sigrid og Håkon Christie (Øvre Ervik: Akademisk förlag, 1993), pp. 181–98; and Sven Rune Havsteen, ‘Lutheran theology and artistic media: responses to the theological discourse on the visual arts’, in Andrew Spicer (ed.), Lutheran Churches in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 221–40.
7 Concerning adiaphora and images, see Jill Raitt, The Colloquy of Montbéliard: Religion and Politics in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); R. B. Sdzuj, Adiaphora und Kunst: Studien zur Genealogie ästhetischen Denkens (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2005); Andrew Spicer, ‘Adiaphora, Luther and the material culture of worship’, Studies in Church History, 56 (2020), 246–72.
8 A vivid impression of the negotiations and conflicts between Church, pastor and church owner can be gained from Charlotte Appel and Morten Fink-Jensen, Når det regner på præsten: En kulturhistorie om sognepæster og sognefolk 1550–1750 (Gjern: Hovedland, 2009).
9 Danmarks Kirker: Frederiksborg Amt, pp. 2725–53, http://danmarkskirker.natmus.dk/uploads/tx_tcchurchsearch/Frederiksborg_2725-2753.pdf [accessed 23 February 2023]. See also Chr. Axel Jensen, ‘Katolsk kirkeinventars skæbne efter Reformationen: Studier og exempler’, in Aarbøger for Nordisk Oldkyndighed og Historie (1921), pp. 167–204.
10 An overview of a substantial number of Danish shrines is presented in Christoph Daxelmüller and Marie-Louise Thomsen, ‘Mittelalterliches Wallfahrtswesen in Dänemark: Mit einem Kultstätten-Katalog’, Jahrbuch für Volkskunde 1 (1978), 155–204.
11 Danske Magazin, 1 (Copenhagen, 1745–1752), p. 96.
12 Erik Pontoppidan (ed.), Den Danske Atlas eller Konge-Riget Dannemark, 7 vols (Copenhagen, 1763–1781), II, p. 95.
13 Danmarks Kirker: Præstø Amt, pp. 65–6, http://danmarkskirker.natmus.dk/uploads/tx_tcchurchsearch/Praestoe_0053-0071.pdf [accessed 23 February 2023].
14 Concerning iconoclasm, see Lee Palmer Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
15 Danmarks Kirker: Ringkøbing Amt, pp. 2941–79, 3010, 3068, http://danmarkskirker.natmus.dk/uploads/tx_tcchurchsearch/Ringkobing_2941-3104.pdf [accessed 23 February 2023].
16 ‘Dette capel som mand heer seer: I pavedom har været: Hvor Dionysius med fleer: Paa sin maneer har læret. Af hannem hæfver det sit nafn, Til en ældgammel minde. Nu brugis det til bedre gafn sligt er ei meer at finde. Til kiende tegn var her af steen et lidet altar muret. Der stod foruden kjød oc been: Den munch af træ oc luret. Mand tog det bort.’
17 ‘Hir vard St. Mathæus vor dem Altar dot gestocken’. Pontoppidan, Den Danske Atlas, III:4, p. 693.
18 See Hans Jørgen Frederiksen, ‘Da Maria fik skæg’, ICO: Iconographisk Post, 2 (1983), 1729; Hans Jørgen Frederiksen, in Ole Høiris and Thomas Ledet (eds), ‘Kristendom, oplysning og billedpolemik’, Oplysningens Verden: Idé, historie, videnskab og kunst (Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2007), pp. 38392.
19 ‘Maria hører ey vor Bøn / vi kun tilbede hendes Søn’.
20 ‘Den usynlige Gud vi ære / Billeder vi kan undvære’.
21 ‘St: Mortens billed her maa staae / Apostlers Ord vi bygge paa’.
22 Danmarks Kirker: Ringkøbing Amt, pp. 1872–87; 2203–22, http://danmarkskirker.natmus.dk/uploads/tx_tcchurchsearch/Ringkobing_1839-1922.pdf [accessed 23 February 2023].
23 Concerning the general trend of antiquarianism, see Rosemary Sweet, ‘Antiquaries and antiquities in eighteenth-century England’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 34:2 (2001), 181–206; Bernd Roling (ed.), Boreas Rising: Antiquarianism and National Narratives in 17th- and 18th-Century Scandinavia (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019).
24 Ragne Bugge, ‘Effigiem Christi, qui transis, semper honora: verses condemning the cult of the sacred images in art and literature’, Acta ad archaeologiam et atrium historiam pertinentia, 6 (1975), 12739.
25 Jürgensen, Ritual, pp. 103–5.
26 ‘Jeg haffver lyst til miskundhed oc icke til offer oc til at kiene gud oc icke til brendoffer’.
27 ‘Jeg skal bruges efter Christi skik, och ey efter Pavfens vrange dict 1634’; Finn Grandt-Nielsen, Fynsk Kirkesølv. Fynske Studier XII (Odense: Odense Bys Museer, 1983), p. 75.
28 ‘Tvende hundred Aar i Tiiden / Er det nu i Danmark, Siden / Wi slap ud af Munke-Skik / Og den Sande Lære fik’; Danmarks Kirker: Frederiksborg Amt, pp. 170–6, http://danmarkskirker.natmus.dk/uploads/tx_tcchurchsearch/Frederiksborg_0039-0289.pdf [accessed 23 February 2023].
29 Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen, ‘The rhetoric of splendour: matter and the invisible in seventeenth-century church art’, Transfiguration: Journal of Religion and the Arts (2013/14), 163–87.
30 Mette Kristine Jensen, ‘Pæn og hvid’, in Eva Louise Lillie (ed.), Danske Kalkmalerier: 1536–1700 (Copenhagen: Nationalmuseet, 1992), pp. 172–3.
31 Danmarks Kirker: Københavns Amt, pp. 967–72, http://danmarkskirker.natmus.dk/uploads/tx_tcchurchsearch/kob_amt_958-976.pdf [accessed 23 February 2023].
32 Danmarks Kirker: Præstø Amt, pp. 999–1007, http://danmarkskirker.natmus.dk/uploads/tx_tcchurchsearch/Praestoe_0999-1007.pdf [accessed 23 February 2023].
33 See the description of the church in J. P. Trap, Danmark, 5th edn, 15 vols (Copenhagen: Gads, 1953–1972), VII (1963), pp. 876–8.
35 See for instance Frederiksen, ‘Da Maria’, 17–29.
36 ‘Jeg tør påstå, at den sande og hjertets religion er alt for sjælden blandt landalmuen; at de så udvortes skingode gerninger, som findes blandt mængden, oftere er frugter af håb om gentjenester, end af den sande og levende pligternes erkendelse, som dog burde være driveren for den sande kristne til dydernes udøvelse’; F. Chr. Hjorth, Tanker til Eftertanke om Religion og Sæderne blandt den danske Landalmue (Copenhagen, 1784), p. 20.
37 See this discussed in Palle O. Christensen, A Manorial World: Lord, peasants and cultural distinctions on a Danish estate 1750–1980 (Copenhagen: Scandinavian University Press, 1996); Peter Henningsen, ‘Det antropologiske bondebegreb’, Fortid og Nutid, 1 (2000), 29–58, and the same author’s ‘Den rationelle bonde: en historisk-antropologisk analyse af traditionalismen i dansk bondekultur’, Historisk Tidsskrift, 100 (2000), 329–81.
38 The volume was translated and republished as Erik Pontoppidan, Fejekost, til at udfeje den gamle surdejg eller de i de danske lande tiloversblevne og her for dagen bragte levninger af saavel hedenskab som papisme, 1736, trans. Jørgen Olrik (Copenhagen: Schønbergske, 1923).
39 ‘Om jeg ved dette en overtroisk Tidsalders practiske Kætteri mest skal forundre mig over dets lastværdige Art eller ærværdige Alder, er jeg noget i Tvivl om. Vi ere indsatte til dets Universal-Arvinger af Papisterne, og Papisterne atter efter Pharisæerne, for at man ikke skal tro det opkommet igaar eller iforgaars’; Pontoppidan, Fejekost, p. 34.
40 Pontoppidan, Fejekost, pp. 34–5.
41 This topic is explored in a wider context in the classic study of Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England (London: Penguin, 2003; first published in 1971).
42 ‘ikke alene formedelst skrøbelighed, men også for de mange til menighedens förargelse derpå stående billeder’; Danmarks Kirker: Præstø Amt, p. 856, http://danmarkskirker.natmus.dk/uploads/tx_tcchurchsearch/Praestoe_0852-0860_01.pdf [accessed 23 February 2023].
44 ‘naar vore mægtige Opklarere vilde selv komme ud og beskue det saakaldte Ægyptiske Mørke, for hvilket at bortdrive de holde sig forpligtede til at skaffe Lysning, om det end skal være ved Torden og Lynild; Saa fik vel Tonen en anden Lyd, eller man tav i det mindste stille, som maaske kunde være det tieneligste’; Christian Larsen (ed.), Biskop Balles Visitationsindberetninger 1783–1793 (Copenhagen: Selskabet for Udgivelse af Kilder til Danmarks Historie, 2002), pp. 55–6.
45 Concerning the work and theological attitude of Bishop Balle, see the introduction to Larsen, Biskop Balles and the engaging L. Koch, Biskop Nicolai Edinger Balle (Copenhagen: Gad, 1876).
46 Robert W. Scribner, ‘The Reformation, popular magic, and the “disenchantment of the world”’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 23 (1993), 475–94.
47 Jens Rasmussen, Vækkelser i dansk luthersk fælleskultur: Andagtsbøger og lægmandsforsamlinger (1800–1840) (Odense: University of Southern Denmark, 2016). On Grundtvig, see Anders Holm, Grundtvig: En introduktion (Copenhagen: Filo, 2018), and the same author’s To Samtidige: En historisk-systematisk undersøgelse af Kierkegaards og Grundtvigs kritik af hinanden (Århus: Aarhus University, 2007).
48 Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen, ‘Protestants and the uncomfortable sainthood’, in Ivert Angel, Hallgeir Elstad and Eivor Andersen Oftestad (eds), Were we ever Protestants? Essays in Honor of Tarald Rasmussen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), pp. 37–72.
49 For a close presentation of the primary sources, see L. Koch, Oplysningstiden i den danske Kirke 1770–1800 (Copenhagen: Selskabet for Danmarks Kirkehistorie, 1914).
50 Jürgensen, Ritual, pp. 82–90.
52 Concerning the interplay between church owner and the Reformation of parish churches during the eighteenth century, see Ebbe Nyborg and Birgitte Bøggild Johannsen, ‘Herregård og kirke’, in John Erichsen and Mikkel Vengeborg (eds), Herregården: Menneske, samfund, landskab, bygninger (Copenhagen: National Museum of Denmark, 2005), pp. 241–90.
53 An example of a church with preserved furnishings inserted by Baroness Gyldensteen is Guldbjerg Church; see Danmarks Kirker: Odense Amt, pp. 5750–65, http://danmarkskirker.natmus.dk/uploads/tx_tcchurchsearch/Odense_5739-5772.pdf [accessed 23 February 2023].
54 Claus M. Smidt, ‘Folkekirkens tid’, in Hugo Johannsen and Claus M. Smidt (eds), Danmarks Arkitektur: Kirkens huse (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1981), pp. 163–97.
55 ‘Man vil og kan i vore Dage, hverken i Nord eller Syd, dyrke Gud i græske templer, eller boe i pompeiiske Huse’; Christian Molbech, Anmærkninger over nyere Tiders Architectur særdeles i Danmark og i Kiøbenhavn, med nogle Ord om Fornyelsen af gammel Bygningsstil i Sverige (Copenhagen: Bianco Lunos Bogtrykkeri, 1855), p. 40.
56 See, for instance, Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
57 ‘Men vogt dig for at tro, at vi have i Sinde paa dette Sted at bringe for Lyset og udsætte for Latteren alle de Ting, hver og én, som smage enten af Hedenskabts eller af Papismens Surdejg, og som hos retsindige Dommere om evangelisk Renhed snart opvække Væmmelse, snart fremkalde Bekymring. Der gives Ting, som en ikke ubesindig Fromhed for Tiden snarere mener at burde dække med Kærlighedens og Godhedens Kaabe end at burde afsløre og gennemhegle’; Pontoppidan, Fejekost, p. 3.
58 As Weber for instance argues in his famous lecture of 1917. Reprinted in Max Weber, Wissenschaft als Beruf (Berlin: Reclam, 1995; first published in 1919).

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