In Denmark, the Reformation process formally began when Christian iii (r. 1534–9) abolished the episcopate, imprisoned the bishops and confiscated the ecclesiastical estates in 1536. In Norway, the last Catholic archbishop fought for the preservation of Catholicism and tried to free Norway from the union with Denmark, as Sweden had done in 1523. However, the archbishop failed, and in 1537 had to flee from Norway. When introducing Lutheranism into the country, the Danish kings proceeded much more cautiously than they had done in Denmark, probably because they were afraid of popular protests and rebellion if the new doctrine was imposed with force and haste. Safeguarding the union had highest priority. Accordingly, former Catholic priests were allowed to continue as Lutheran clergymen. Moreover, some of the new superintendents who replaced the bishops had had a Catholic education. The first superintendent of Nidaros, for example, a native of Vesterålen in northern Norway, was originally educated at the Catholic university in Cologne, but the king ordered him to attend the Lutheran universities of Wittenberg and Copenhagen to complete (or rather, modify) his education before he could take up his position. His successors were educated at Lutheran universities, but they were Danes with little or no knowledge of the religious and cultural situation in northern Norway, as Arnold Otto (pp. 11–33) emphasises in his contribution to this volume.

Although the number of Norwegian students at the German universities that had become centres of Lutheranism increased, thus helping to spread Lutheran ideas to Norway, far fewer of them came from the north of the country than the south. It is no surprise that it took many decades for Lutheranism to gain any real influence on local populations in the north. The reformation process was indeed protracted there and the name of the Tromsø project is therefore very apposite. As Ingebjørg Aamlid Dale shows (pp. 202–24), very few members of the clergy in northern Norway had any university education at all. Instead, the majority had probably only received instruction from a local clergyman, who was often the student's father. This type of education was not conducive to the spread of new ideas.

Of the many things that continued, one was the collection of tithes, which were still the main source of income for the Church. Sigrun Høgetveit Berg (pp. 34–61) has compared the institution of tithing before and after the Reformation. In the medieval Church, the income from tithes was divided into separate allocations for the bishop, the local parish priest, the maintenance of the church and the poor. After the Reformation, the allocation to the poor was abolished – although reintroduced in Norway in 1578 after local protests – while the bishop's part was now given to the king instead. By the 1560s, however, these tithes had once again been reserved for church purposes.

One interesting example of how protracted the Reformation was in northern Norway is discussed in the contribution by Siv Rasmussen (pp. 265–85), in which she discusses, among other things, the Catholic traditions of celebrating saints’ days and fasting, which continued among the Sami population until the early eighteenth century. The Sami, she argues, regarded the Lutheran faith as a Norwegian form of Christianity, whereas they were inclined to retain their own (more Catholic) practices. This distinction was even used as a marker of an ethnic boundary between the two groups, she concludes. Other examples of the protracted Reformation process in the north are offered in two contributions that deal with church art. In southern Norway, the use of regal symbols in Lutheran churches was widespread; the royal coat of arms or the royal monogram was a frequent embellishment on walls, pulpits, rood screens, benches and altar paintings. But, as Daniel Johansen shows (pp. 355–88), these royal symbols were far less common in the north. Vidar Trædal (pp. 335–54) gives many examples of how, instead, medieval Catholic art was recycled and moved to newly built churches in northern Norway.

During the reign of Christian vi (r. 1730–46), Pietism became state policy, although it had already been supported by Frederik iv (r. 1699–1730), who in 1714 established the College of Missions in order to stimulate a religious revival within the Church and promote missionary work among the communities within the Danish empire which were regarded as non-Christian. These were the indigenous peoples of Greenland and Trankebar, and the Sami of northern Norway. Dikka Storm (pp. 169–201) has made a micro-study of the effects of this missionary endeavour during the early eighteenth century in one local area, with a special focus on the confrontation between pietist mission and indigenous Sami religion there. By means of a new reading of published sources and the analysis of archival material, she throws new light on both the missionary work and the indigenous religion in this area.

Other contributions in the volume that deal with ecclesiastical history are Magne Njåstad's summary of the reformation processes in Sweden (pp. 88–106), Evgeny Khodakovsky's discussion of the role of the architecture of new churches in northern Russia after the Church Reform of the 1650s (pp. 107–36) and Ingebjørg Hage's presentation of the results of an investigation of parsonages in northern Norway during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (pp. 225–62). All in all, the contributions (and also those dealing with themes other than ecclesiastical history) give a balanced, well-researched and interesting introduction to a selection of themes of high relevance for anyone interested in the history of the religious reformation processes of northern Fennoscandia from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century.