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pastor was a farmer. In addition came the tithe of the agrarian production of the parish, offerings and fees at church holidays and ritual celebrations. By charging a fee for a funeral sermon, the pastor could enter into a dialogue with his parishioners about the memory of the deceased, focusing on cultural and religious ideals and standards: what was a good Christian, an honest farmer and a law-abiding subject of the king? 21 The sermon, the rectory, the pastor’s family and remuneration constituted a public
flee the country in 1537. In order to erase the memory and the cult of the so-called eternal king of Norway, Danish officials buried the body of St Olaf in an unknown grave some years after the Reformation (a course of events markedly different to the treatment of St Erik in Sweden following the Reformation; see Chapter 7 ). As the Danish king had all of a sudden declared the Norwegians to be Lutherans, the memory of St Olaf and the Norwegian Catholic past could potentially threaten the union of Norway and Denmark under one
: Frihetstiden (Stockholm: Svenska kyrkans diakonistyrelse, 1926 ), p. 90. For parallel arguments on the local varieties in recent Norwegian studies, see Viken, Frygte Gud og ære Kongen , pp. 25, 97–8, 430; Thomas Ewen Daltveit Slettebø, In Memory of Divine Providence: A Study of Centennial Commemoration in Eighteenth-Century Denmark–Norway (1717–1760) (Bergen: University of Bergen, 2016 ), pp. 11, 189, 476. 19 On the studied clergymen, parishes and sermon material, see Joonas
regarded as purely historical objects; as such, there seems to have been little need to criticize them – though one of the rectors in the collections of Olof Sundholm stated that the church of Kölaby had a small thurible made of metal, which was ‘preserving the memory of the Catholic buffoonery’. 53 Unlike images in painted or sculptured form, these do not seem to have presented a possible threat to orthodoxy and were therefore usually not described in the same hostile manner by topographers, collectors and clergy
otherwise both detailed and true to earlier history-writing shows not only that medieval Catholic customs were thought to be embarrassing, but also that Erik still possessed a function as a role model whose memory needed to be protected. Harmony between past and present was the main concern in this history-writing, not conflict between what was considered to be right or wrong. Changes during the Enlightenment era All this began to change rather suddenly at a specific point in time, namely 1689. The year before
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