Research in the philosophical, institutional, personal and local history of religious beliefs and practices in eighteenth-century Europe has led to some striking new insights in recent years. Intellectual historians have scrutinised some of the increasingly open disagreements over biblical translation and interpretation from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, the meaning of miracles or divine intervention, liturgy, the role of the clergy, while cultural historians have explored changing attitudes within the Christian Churches towards Jewish and other minorities, and cautious contacts with the Muslim world. Not surprisingly, interest has tended to focus on those areas where profound differences of opinion were most visible, notably England, the Netherlands, France and those parts of Germany where different faith groups confronted each other in a more complex political environment. As the introduction to this volume makes clear, we should not expect major controversies in a part of Europe where the Lutheran Church was totally dominant, and where political structures did not allow for major deviations from established religious orthodoxy – in short, where religious Enlightenment (in a more radical western European sense) had only modest scope for development. Instead, we are given refreshing insights into the work of ordinary parish clergymen, case studies of individual efforts to accommodate rational empiricism within the constraints of traditional Lutheran adherence to the Augsburg Confession, and occasional glimpses of how the long-established ideas of spiritual ‘light’ might bring acceptance of more liberal Enlightenment.

The volume contains an editorial introduction, fourteen substantive chapters and an epilogue, with seventeen scholars mostly working in universities in Scandinavia. The chapters, each of which is supported by footnotes and individual bibliographies, provide very welcome insights into a subject area where new research is not readily accessible to scholars who do not read the Scandinavian languages or sources. The first four chapters, which focus on rural communities, note how local clergymen largely followed the expected pattern inherent in their training, emphasising uniformity and hierarchy alongside personal devotion within the newer parameters of Lutheran Pietism. In the more thinly populated areas of northern Scandinavia, the clergy often worked largely in isolation from episcopal control, except for occasional visitation or written communication. Not surprisingly, there is little provincial evidence of any impact of new ideas: the kinds of printed texts that might be found in Stockholm or Copenhagen were not widely disseminated or read. Nevertheless, evidence from unpublished sermons, visitation records and a growing use of systematic surveys throw some light on how church communities functioned.

The next five chapters focus on how the Church dealt with its medieval and Catholic past. There was a remarkable degree of religious uniformity and conformity across all of Scandinavia, with only tiny enclaves of tolerated minorities (mostly of other Reformed affiliation). The prevailing view therefore seems to have been a rational dismissal of pre-Reformation beliefs, imagery and rituals regarded as forms of superstition that were no longer of much interest. Even those historians working in Copenhagen who gained a wide reputation across Europe and wrote for a wider audience, such as the Norwegian Ludvig Holberg and the Danish Peter Suhm, did not question what by the eighteenth century had become religious and political orthodoxy. In Sweden historical writers merely summarised issues regarding for example the questionable reputation of the founding saint and early monarch, St Erik. In Denmark, scholars and senior clergy seem to have made light of the vivid medieval fresco decorations that had not yet been painted over. We note only one major controversy in relation to Catholicism: a chapter by Yvonne Maria Werner presents fascinating new insights into the quite fierce reaction faced by the autocratic (if superficially Francophile) Gustavus iii from 1783 when he appeared to initiate an actual rapprochement with Rome. This was so totally at odds with current theological thinking that it generated major dissent amongst the Swedish clergy.

The last five chapters focus on more specific contentious issues in Scandinavian church history, giving us fresh insights into what lay below the otherwise calm surface. A chapter by Tine Reeh and Ralf Hemmingsen examines Pietist introspection and melancholy in the context of sixty-four cases of infanticide brought before the courts in Copenhagen between 1697 and 1779. Although these were tried according to the Danish law code of 1683 and other older texts, mitigating circumstances relating to the mental condition of the perpetrator were now taken into account. Jesper Jakobsen and Lars Cyril Nørgaard examine the records relating to the censorship role of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Copenhagen from 1738, noting which senior clergymen (including the influential Erik Pontoppidan) helped to define what was acceptable within the very conservative intellectual milieu which prevailed until the implementation of freedom of the press in 1770. Tensions between conservative tradition and enlightened thinking are also discussed by Johannes Ljungberg, who examines the records of alleged crimes of sabbath-breaking and ‘good police’ in the city of Altona, the prosperous but atypical southern-most city subject to the Danish crown and close to Hamburg on the Elbe. Turning to wider issues of political economy, Christina Petterson focuses on the experimental liberalisation initiated by Carl August Struensee towards the Moravian Brethren, who were allowed to settle in Schleswig early in the reign of Christian vii, during the brief regency by the king's personal physician and adviser, the cameralist Johann Friedrich Struensee (1770–2). We then move north-east, and to a later time-frame, for the final chapter, where Esko Laine discusses mass vaccination practices in rural Finland between 1802 and 1825, noting how the clergy could play a key role in negotiating the clash between new medical ideas and the more traditional popular religious beliefs of resignation and superstition. In a fitting epilogue, Anders Jarlett re-assesses how rationalism, empiricism and variant forms of enlightened learning could co-exist with Pietism and beliefs in the mysteries of creation. He emphasises that the Enlightenment consisted of many disparate strands, in Scandinavia as elsewhere.