Historisk tidskrift 128:3 • 2008
Innehåll (Contents) 2008:3
Uppsatser (Articles)
Syndens straf og mandens ære. Danske tolkninger af krigen 1611–1660
Gunner Lind
Fulltext (pdf)
Summary
The scourge of sin and manly honour: Danish interpretations
of war, 1611–1660
More than 500 Danish printed texts from the period 1611–1660
deal with war. Very prominent, as in all of Christendom, was
the interpretation of war as God’s scourge of sin. This was
forcefully promoted by the Lutheran church, supported by the
secular arm, and visible in an increasingly elaborate penitential
liturgy and in official printed texts. ‘Private’ devotional
texts might focus on God as the lord of victory; but they too
became increasingly dominated by the penitential inter- pretation
of war. Peace, not victory, was sought, and only by penitence
and prayer.
Secular texts rarely dealt with war as a scourge. If they
did, it explained why war existed in general. In every current
war, God was addressed as the lord of victory, and generally
in short and formal terms. The secular texts, even the seemingly
neutral newsletters, were biased. They presented the war as
a cause belonging to a Danish ”we”. This partiality was increasingly
expressed in explic- itly patriotic terms. Most of all, however,
war was seen as an arena where the manly victor earned his
honour and the defeated suffered ignominy. It was a perspective
of the actor, or vicarious actor, and not of the sufferer.
There is no indication of an explicit conflict between these
ideas although they competed silently on the print market.
During the last two decades, the devo- tional prints were overwhelmed
by the secular texts. In the print market, the penitential
interpretation of war was marginalized by the viewpoint of
the sol- dier.
Keywords
Denmark, war, penitence, patriotism, honour
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