”Gudfruktig på sitt sätt”: Dövas tro i det tidigmoderna Sverige

Abstract

”Pious in one’s own way”: Deaf people’s religious faith in early modern Sweden

In this article we are concerned with how faith was embodied in the nonnormative body and ultimately what constituted early modern Protestant faith. We address how deaf people in early modern Sweden expressed their religious faith in such way as they were considered pious and included in the community of believers.

Listening to sermons has long been considered central in the church history and cultural history of the Lutheran Reformations and Protestant religious culture. Ordinary Christians were seen as an audience above all else, and a sense of hearing was the most important of all the senses in religious practice. New research in cultural history and the history of the senses has nuanced this understanding by arguing that other senses and embodied practices remained important to Protestantism. However, the focus has been the normative body, while historians of disability have shown the precarious situation of deaf people in the religious milieus of early modern Protestantism. In this article we examine a series of court cases and other sources from early modern Sweden, charting how deaf people’s religious beliefs and practices were treated in local contexts.

The study finds that deafness was considered a troublesome affliction, not only because of the inability to hear, but also because it was considered to impair people’s cognitive and possibly spiritual capacities. This understanding seems to have brought with it an acceptance that deaf people were unlikely to benefit from an intellectual understanding of religious education. Despite the prejudice, however, deaf people were included in religious practice and accepted as true Christians. The deaf Christians’ animated participation in religious rituals such as the Eucharist or divine Service, along with embodied practices such as sighing or kneeling to pray, were seen as genuine displays of faith, physically and emotionally. Moreover, there seems to have been a general consensus that deaf people performed their faith in ways that suited them best, often expressed as ‘in one’s own way’. These findings indicate that the early modern Protestant faith was indeed embodied and emotional, but it could be performed and expressed in many ways, depending on each Christian’s personal circumstances.