Political and Legal Perspectives: The Dynamics of Religious Reform in Northern Europe, 1780-1920

Introduction

Introduction 7 Introduction Keith Robbins Part I: Envisaging ‘Northern Europe’ ‘The Dynamics of Religious Reform in Church, State and Society in Northern Europe 1780-1920’ encompasses a wide field of investigation. The first task is to consider what kind of ‘place identity’ is being suggested by the term ‘Northern Europe’. A moment’s reflection or, alternatively, prolonged immersion in the concepts of cultural geography, prompts the response that there is no simple, single and universally satisfying answer. A name distinguishes a particular place from other spatial entities. Its sense may be weak or strong. Its identity, supposing we can speak confidently about identity, may be established either by some kind of internal coherence or by reference to a perceived ‘Other’. These two aspects may fuse, or separate, at different points in time. So it is with the ‘Northern Europe’ of this project. There is no map which tells us unambiguously where to locate it: what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’. Different vantage points suggest different conclusions about where borders and boundaries are and what, in turn, they signify. Historians, political scientists, geographers and ethnologists are all capable of producing their own definitions - and disagree about the appropriate starting point. The ‘inclusions’ of one century may be the ‘exclusions’ of another. So it is even the case within the long nineteenth century adopted in this project - and periodization has its own elements of arbitrariness. There is, therefore, an inescapable fuzziness about ‘Northern Europe’. We cannot approach it with any confident sense of what constitute its ‘core’ and what its ‘periphery’. It has no ‘capital’ and there are Keith Robbins 8 Great Britain and Ireland Iceland Norway Sweden Denmark Germany The Netherlands Belgium (Luxemburg) (France) (Russia) (Austria) Scotland England London Ireland Wales Brussels Amsterdam Berlin Copenhagen Stockholm Christiania (Oslo) Dublin Edingburgh ‘Northern Europe’ c.1870. Introduction 9 up avenues: Davies, Europe; Schulze, Staat und Nation; Duroselle, Europe. 1 It is no part of this project to produce a definition of ‘Europe’ but the following works by British, German and French historians respectively open no ‘provinces’. To say that is merely to state what applies also to ‘Europe’ itself.1 The ‘heart of Europe’ is an enigma inside a mystery. ‘North’ and ‘South’ can at least be said to have polar compasses. But no such help becomes available in defining ‘Western ’ and ‘Eastern’ and whether there is indeed a ‘Central Europe’ which consists of ‘lands in between’ packaged now one way and then another. The scope for further sub-division is always there - South-East Europe or North-West Europe, for example but it is an enterprise which still always frays at awkward edges. In the very act of assembling common ‘content’ to cartography, ‘out of area’ facts obstinately obtrude. So, the ‘Northern Europe’ of this project is consciously capacious, unashamedly provocative and inescapably blurred. One size does not fit all. Moreover, the delimitation has been made with particular regard to the fact that the focus is specifically on ‘religious reform’. Another focus might well yield a different combination. It has meant that, taken as a whole, the church and state structures under review have sufficient commonality to be comparable, but also sufficient diversity to avoid a monochrome analysis. This is not a view of ‘Northern Europe’ as Protestant which is in contrast or even in opposition to a ‘Southern Europe’ which is Catholic. It straddles different internal confessional balances. All that said, and much more in the same vein has been and could be said, the countries under scrutiny are England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Belgium, the Netherlands , Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. The word ‘country’ is manifestly a loose one. They are not all ‘states’. What their ‘names’ signified in 1780, from a constitutional or political perspective, was by no means always what they signified in 1920. In turn, these countries have been grouped into four blocs: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the Low Countries, Germany and Scandinavia/the Nordic Region. This grouping reflects the fact that we are dealing with ‘countries’ which had their own religious characteristics but which, in this period, constituted parts of a unitary state, perhaps even a nation-state; countries which were, for a short or substantial time, unitary states, or countries which were in the process of forming a state/empire. The fact that all the countries concerned are, relatively speaking, ‘close’ to each other makes likely, to an extent...