Religious Reading in the Lutheran North

Studies in Early Modern Scandinavian Book Culture

Edited By: Charlotte Appel, Morten Fink-Jensen

£39.99

Religious Reading in the Lutheran North opens up an overlooked part of early modern history. Following the Reformation, high literacy fueled a boom in religious literature across the Nordic countries. This book investigates publication, reading habits, and interpretations.

Religious Reading in the Lutheran North opens up the doors to a part of early modern European history that has often been overlooked. In the…

Religious Reading in the Lutheran North opens up the doors to a part of early modern European history that has often been overlooked. In the Nordic countries, an abundance of religious literature in the vernacular was produced in the centuries following the Reformation, and reading was almost exclusively taught to children in a Lutheran Protestant setting. Literacy rates were high, and by the mid eighteenth century around ninety per cent of both men and women could read. The eight contributions to the present book investigate different aspects of religious reading in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Greenland, looking at the publication and dissemination strategies of authors and clergymen, as well as reading habits and interpretations among Scandinavian readers.

Dr Charlotte Appel is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at Roskilde University and is presently working as Chief Editor of a multi-volume history of elementary schools in Denmark, a project based at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University. Her research areas include the history of literacy and education, the history of the book and ecclesiastical and cultural history.

Dr Morten Fink-Jensen is Associate Professor of History at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, currently working on a multi-volume history of Danish schools. He is also an affiliated research fellow at the Royal Library in Copenhagen. He has published on ecclesiastical and cultural history, as well as the history of religion and science in early modern Denmark.

Gina Dahl, Trygve Riiser Gundersen, Jon Haarberg, Thorkild Kjærgaard, Ann Öhrberg, Daniel Lindmark