Finding
The meticulous standard of the ample references maintained in the volumes already published will justify their use as the definitive treatment of the subject in English.
Paper
Rome and the Counter-Reformation in Scandinavia, until the Establishment of the S. Congregatio de Propaganda Fide in 1622, II : 1583–1622. By O. Garstein. Pp. xii + 626, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1980. N.kr. 192.
Abstract
Rome and the Counter-Reformation in Scandinavia, until the Establishment of the S. Congregatio de Propaganda Fide in 1622, I I : 1383-1622. By O. Garstein. Pp. xii + 626, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1980. N.kr. 192. Contemporary comparison of recusant martyrs in England and Catholics executed in the Scandinavian kingdoms underlines the importance for the English reader of the second volume of Oskar Garstein's study. The first volume, which appeared in 1963, established the intention of tracing the history of Catholicism in Scandinavia from the Reformation to the foundation of the papal Congregation De Propaganda Fide in 1622: to the start of the Thirty Years' War, effectively. A third and a fourth volume are promised, to cover the history of Scandinavian Catholic students abroad in greater detail and the period from 1622 to the conversion of Christina of Sweden. The meticulous standard of the ample references maintained in the volumes already published will justify their use as the definitive treatment of the subject in English. But the episodic nature of much of the contents of this second volume raises interesting questions for the recusant historian and the Counter-Reformation historian alike. In the period studied here, from 1583 to 1622, it is clear, the history of Catholicism in Scandinavia is akin to that in the British Isles and not to that of the continental Counter-Reformation. First, the secular sequence of political events is all-important. The fortunes of Catholicism in Scandinavia depend on the relations not only between Denmark (with Norway) and Sweden (with Finland), but even more between the duke of Sodermanland (subsequently Charles ix of Sweden) and Sigismund m (ultimately king of Poland but no longer of Sweden). The crucial division between the Protestant and Catholic Vasa line is worked out against the international background of imperial interests in Poland, Spanish and Dutch antagonism, Anglo-Scots concern, French and Turkish developments and, above all, the troubled times of Russia. At the beginning of the volume the seemingly ubiquitous personification of the Jesuits in the Counter-Reformation, Possevino, is planning the employment of Russia to outflank infidels and heretics in the defence of Catholicism; by the end of the volume Russian orthodoxy and Romanov independence have been reasserted against both the Vasa kingdoms and their religions. At the turning-point, in the seminal pontificate of Clement vu, when the religious map of Europe was substantially redrawn, the Catholic triumph in Poland, including the Union of the Eastern-rite Catholics, was balanced by the collapse of Catholic royal authority in Sweden. As with the English mission, then, and those in Wales, Scodand and Ireland, the education abroad, not least by Jesuits, of students designed for both the clerical and the lay life became vital. But, as with those missions too, the perplexity, for contemporaries, of distinguishing political conspiracy from maintenance of the faith was very real. Other parallels are suggested by the problems of legitimating marriage or maintaining fasts and feasts in a non-Catholic kingdom. The establishment of the Lutheran Church in both Sweden and Denmark was also an obstacle to Catholic mission as solid as was that of the Church of England. Lutheran bishops clearly exercised, under royal authority, effective control of the clergy, despite the difficulties of geography and, above all, of internal doctrinal and disciplinary divisions. The impact of international Lutheran and Calvinist disputes is shown at some length, not least for the Swedish Church: the parallels with puritan objection to official forms of worship and ceremony are striking. The question of lay attachment to traditional forms of ritual, despite royal Reformation, is thus raised for Scandinavia as for
Authors
A. Wright
Journal
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History