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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