An emotional landscape of devotion : Religious experience in Reformation-period Sweden

Sammanfattning: This thesis explores how the Reformation in Sweden was experienced by 16th century people through an examination of emotional practices. It argues that religious texts such as prayer books, sermon collections and instruction manuals were formative for the religious setting of the 16th century and that the use of these texts would therefore involve emotional practices for the 16thcentury Christian, thus creating an emotional experience of the Reformation for the Christian who used these texts.The thesis has shown that religious texts from the early Reformation, ca 1526–1571, were abundantly emotional but that the emotions they would create in the Christian who used them would vary both depending on the type of emotional practice that the texts would entail and depending on when during the period examined the texts were from. There was a greater span of different emotions in the earlier texts examined, while the emotions in the later texts examined were more uniform, thus possibly creating a more forceful emotional experience of the Reformation.The results of this thesis question the view in previous research that the Reformation in Sweden lead to an intellectualisation of religion. It shows that emotions were central in 16thcentury religious experience, which concurs with recent research on the Reformations around Europe, in which the spatial, social, corporal, material and emotional aspects of religious experience in the 16th century have been highlighted.