Religion
The ways in which a bureaucratic model of oversight could be turned into a vehicle of individualizing religious practices in late eighteenth-century Sweden is the central concern of this chapter. The chapter focuses on how bureaucratic measures could be used to implement enlightened reform, thereby offering a different perspective on ‘pastoral Enlightenment’ in the rural European North. By examining how Olof Wallquist, a late eighteenth-century Swedish bishop, used his position as an ecclesiastical superior to promote change, a novel perspective on the blending of individualism and confessional culture is offered. This testifies to a process of gradual, microscopic dislocations in which key elements of a previous social order were overtaken, step by step, by different standards of behaviour.
This chapter argues for the continued importance of studying the intertwining of Enlightenment and confessional culture in order to increase our understanding of how the Enlightenment took shape in the Nordic countries during the long eighteenth century. Proceeding from a careful evaluation of current scholarship, it provides an overview of political, cultural and socio-economic tendencies in the two early modern Nordic states in relation to the overall theme of the book. On the basis of this inventory, specific characteristics of the Lutheran North were selected to form the structure of the ensuing chapters. In comparison to other parts of Europe, the specific setting for Enlightenment ideas and practices that materialized in the Nordic countries was marked by their rural character, as well as by their two hundred years of almost undisturbed mono-confessional Lutheranism.
This volume explores how changes that we tend to associate with the Enlightenment were intertwined with practices and rationales within Lutheran confessional culture in the two Nordic states during the long eighteenth century. It does so by examining several well-rehearsed topics of Enlightenment studies. Scientific novelties, realized policies, and reading as well as printing practices are all themes that return in this book; here they are understood in relation to the various modes and rationales of confessional culture. More precisely, all the contributions to the present volume deal with ideas related to three ‘R’s: reason, rationalism and reform. The eighteenth century encountered in this volume is not only a story of clashes and conflicts. Reason is not necessarily seen as replacing religious belief, nor is rationalism viewed as opposed to reasonings occurring within religious policies or institutions. Evidence of reform may in some cases be interpreted as expressions of Enlightenment; but there is a recurring echo of previous religious transformations and measures promoting renewal, not least in relation to the historical experience of the Lutheran Reformation. Therefore, the writers have chosen to place the notion of ‘religious Enlightenment’ at the core of this book. All the various chapters proceed from this fundamental conception in their explorations of ideas and practices that were embedded in a landscape shaped by both reason and orthodoxy.
This chapter explores the ways in which the Enlightenment was introduced and negotiated in rural Norway through the lens of three eighteenth-century pastors. It is argued that ‘pastoral Enlightenment’ was dominant in Norway, where the clergy were central in a state administration of the king’s subjects and where options for control, deliberation and communication were limited. Just like their predecessors, enlightened pastors struggled to accommodate and adapt to the local public. The chapter demonstrates how they sought to understand and interpret their congregations, and how they communicated and negotiated with them while simultaneously addressing a national literate audience. Balancing this cultural and theological ambiguity, these clergymen demonstrate the complexity of the ‘Enlightenment’ in the European North.
This chapter demonstrates how the implementation of the Danish Sabbath ordinance, a reform introduced by the confessional state, was invigorated by the introduction of police regulations in the eighteenth century. Taking the extreme example of Altona, the first free town of the Danish realm, the chapter demonstrates how the city’s police director praised the ordinance as being a useful tool for an ‘enlightened government’. In practice, it caused tension between two Enlightenment values that were characteristic of the city: commercial interest and tolerance of religious pluralism. The case study indicates the advantages of studying confessional culture and Enlightenment as coexisting and intertwined phenomena in the eighteenth century.
Whereas previous generations of historians had been relatively tolerant towards some of the expressions of medieval Christianity, this chapter reveals how an emphasis on common-sense rationality led to increasingly hostile views of the ‘Catholic past’ among late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Swedish historians. By means of close analysis of the era’s principal historical works, the chapter demonstrates how Swedish authors managed to simultaneously criticize a competing faith system and mark their own time as civilized and rational. The chapter concludes that the Enlightenment had a bigger impact than the Reformation with regard to the re-evaluation of Sweden’s Catholic past.
The literary output of the Finnish disabled and self-taught writer Tuomas Ragvaldinpoika (1724–1804) is explored in this chapter, which supplies a close reading of his various works. It is argued that Ragvaldinpoika trod a fine line between the ideas of Lutheran orthodoxy and of the Enlightenment. His autobiographical texts represent a comparatively new world view; but the commercial texts written for other people’s funerals and weddings adhered to traditional lines, reflecting features of Lutheran orthodoxy, Pietism and folk belief. From the Enlightenment, Ragvaldinpoika especially adopted conceptions about medicine and doctors. This chapter offers a unique view of how old and new ideals blended in a rural voice placed very much at the margins of society.
The newly digitised Manchester Observer (1818–22) was England’s leading radical newspaper at the time of the Peterloo meeting of August 1819, in which it played a central role. For a time it enjoyed the highest circulation of any provincial newspaper, holding a position comparable to that of the Chartist Northern Star twenty years later and pioneering dual publication in Manchester and London. Its columns provide insights into Manchester’s notoriously secretive local government and policing and into the labour and radical movements of its turbulent times. Rich materials in the Home Office papers in the National Archives reveal much about the relationship between radicals in London and in the provinces, and show how local magistrates conspired with government to hound the radical press in the north as prosecutions in London ran into trouble. This article also sheds new light on the founding of the Manchester Guardian, which endured as the Observer’s successor more by avoiding its disasters than by following its example. Despite the imprisonment of four of its main editors and proprietors the Manchester Observer battled on for five years before sinking in calmer water for lack of news.
The Peterloo Massacre was more than just a Manchester event. The attendees, on whom Manchester industry depended, came from a large spread of the wider textile regions. The large demonstrations that followed in the autumn of 1819, protesting against the actions of the authorities, were pan-regional and national. The reaction to Peterloo established the massacre as firmly part of the radical canon of martyrdom in the story of popular protest for democracy. This article argues for the significance of Peterloo in fostering a sense of regional and northern identities in England. Demonstrators expressed an alternative patriotism to the anti-radical loyalism as defined by the authorities and other opponents of mass collective action.