The results of our investigation call for a modification of an established theory regarding female child murderers in the eighteenth century. Although a death wish can be detected in a minority of our cases, the idea of execution as a short cut to salvation is entirely absent as a motive in the court cases at which we have looked.906 the explanations of the acts Piety as a motive for murder is an idea that has been strong in Danish research. Now it is questioned from Denmark when Tine Reeh and Ralf Hemmingsen conclude from their study of twenty-one of the cases that Tyge Krogh understands as suicide murder: While Krogh sees the Lutheran theology as a cause of these murders maybe it also was a probable reason for a state seeing itself as having a responsibility for the salvation of all humans, even those it puts to death, thereby noticing the theological notions concerning salvation around the execution. The milieu where such crimes were rather common probably also was a milieu that takes theology and the question of the salvation of the individual very serious and where insecurity relating to one’s own salvation is not uncommon.907 Some presuppositions concerning religion, penalties of death, executions, and, finally, these crimes, are sometimes found in research. Hugh McLeod criticises Rituals of Retributionby Richard Evans even though he calls it ”the best book yet published on the history of executions” for assuming that ”the Enlightenment was non-religious or even anti-religious”. Opposing these ideas McLeod thinks that it is only after 1850 that the priests, at least in Germany, supported the penalty of death. He also seems to have a case negating the view that beliefs, Christian, atheistic, or whatever, would result in a specific, positive or negative, view of the penalty of death.908 906 Reeh and Hemmingsen 2018 p 131. However Tyge Krogh questions the methods and results of Reeh and Hemmningsen in Krogh 2020. 907 Krogh himself in Krogh 2020 p 232 describes the relationship between the state and the murderer like this: ”When I call my book ’A Lutheran Plague’, it is not to argue that the individual murderer necessarily had to be especially religious. It was the Lutheran state that felt obliged by God to execute killers and thereby provided the certainty of execution, and it was the Lutheran soteriology elaborated in the church ritual that created execution ceremonies that provided additional motivations for suicidal people tobecome murderers.” 908 McLeod 2004 p 332 sqq (quotations p 332 and 333). 254
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