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Kyrktagningsseden i Sverige

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... En säger t.o.m . att "inga var så fina som judeflickorna' ( 13) . ...
... Också andra nämner judarnas storrengöring av köket och byte av köksutensilier, i samtliga fall är meddelarna kvinnor. ( 13,14) Det uppges också att påskbrygden inköptes i stora kaggar ( 19), och en säger: "I slutet av påsken berusade de sig med billigt vin." (12) Iakttagelserna om den judiska storrengöringen och utbyte av vardagens hushållsutensilier mot andra och nyare är naturligtvis alldeles riktiga. Detta _ stod i överensstämmelse med den ortodoxa läran, vars många olika förhållningsregler i samband med påsken dock får förbigås här. ...
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Taking Denmark as a case study, this article retraces the ritual of churching of women after childbirth 1750c-1965. Churching offers a new angle into women’s religiosity and perception of their procreative body. Placed at the intersection of religion and everyday life, churching was as much a clerical ritual as a social custom at the centre of communal life and a feast day for the married mother. Rooted in Levitical childbirth impurity, adopted as a Christian purification ritual, then redefined by Lutheran reformers as a thanksgiving rite, churching continued along parallel tracks in Europe into the nineteenth and twentieth century in many places. Yet churching has fallen out of common memory in Denmark as elsewhere. This article first examines the clerical rite, demonstrating how churching elevated a mother’s status in the congregation, affording her time, space and honour, a position she lost when churching ceased. The second part analyses the childbirth cycle from pregnancy to churching when society imposed different norms on women. Childbirth was dangerous and physical vulnerability compounded by widespread fears of evil spirits and a sense of being impure. Rather than simply a thanksgiving ceremony, churching often represented an apotropaic and healing passage back to safety.
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The midwifery art has emphasised the uniqueness of human beings throughout its Nordic history. The educated Nordic midwife has in the last decade celebrated several hundred years of memories. This article studies how the key ideas of the midwifery art and patterns of ideas become evident in the zeitgeist from the beginning of the 19th century to the millennium in the Nordic countries. The legacy and pattern of ideas of the art of midwifery are interpreted in relation to the texts of the selected historical sources and based on Ricoeur's phenomenological‐hermeneutic approach to the text and further to the dedication of understanding and interpretation. The historical sources refer to unprinted primary sources from historical archives and printed secondary and tertiary sources. The patterns of ideas include a tripartite whole: the true cultivation of the head, the philosophy and aesthetics of the hand, the strength of the heart and the drive of calling. These ideas open for unique visions and attest to the evident in modern midwives. Today's midwives have academic training with examinations, and the education is based on scientific evidence. The midwife profession is authorised by the state and supervised by the authorities.
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In the seventeenth century, a common saying in parts of rural Sweden when discussing someone lacking in piety was that they went to neither church nor cross. This reflects the practice of placing shrines in the fields, along the roads and in the woods as a communal semi-domestic complement to official church space. In the remote woodland areas of Sweden, the distance between parish churches could be considerable, and many parishioners were not able to attend church on a regular, weekly basis. At these sites, parishioners could kneel and make their prayers as a complement to church service. However, they could also be used as points of contact in communicating domestic issues with the divine, with votives being left at the shrines by those hoping for deliverance from disease and difficult childbirths. In the post-reformation period, such sites were regarded with suspicion by the higher ranks of the clergy, and were often considered "idolatrous" and "superstitious". Yet, they seem to have filled an important religious need among their laity that made it possible to interact with the divine on sites bordering the domestic and the public space of the church.
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This paper demonstrates that sight and hearing have played the most important roles in the Protestant regions of Scandinavia. In many instances, the phenomena linked to sight and hearing have been maintained for long periods of time, and new phenomena have come into existence in other respects. Revivalist movements have wavered between maintenance of traditions and a regeneration that would enable them to awaken interest among new generations. Senses other than sight and hearing have not had the same importance in the post-Reformation period. However, touch has played a more important role than previously realized by scholars of cultural history. Taste and smell, on the other hand, have not yet acquired the same importance as touch, even if taste has acquired a new social function in a religious context. *** Razprava pokaže, da sta bila v skandinavskih protestantskih deželah med čuti najpomembnejša vid in sluh. V številnih primerih so se pojavi, povezani z vidom in sluhom, zelo dolgo ohranili, novi pojavi pa so nastali v drugačnih povezavah. Prenovitvena gibanja so omahovala med vzdrževanjem tradicije in regeneracijo, kar jim je omogočalo zbuditi interes pri mlajših generacijah. V postreformacijskem obdobju drugi čuti niso bili tako pomembni. Vsekakor je imel dotik pomembnejšo vlogo, kakor mu jo pripisujejo kulturni zgodovinarji. Pomen okusa in vonja ni bil tako pomemben, čeprav je okus v religioznem kontekstu dobil novo socialno funkcijo.