introduction of law and repression, public ritual, social discipline, death practices, literature, and art meet.50 To these subjects we can here add theology beyond liturgy and also psychiatry. The questions discussed in this study are in many ways universal, but the ambitions here are more limited. Geographically, examples of different aspects are taken from various parts of Europe and a few European colonies, but dominating are some states in the north – Sweden, Denmark, and some German states. It was a region of a shared culture and, concerning the Lutheran milieu, theology. Many cases are known and have been discussed, and the preponderance of the work already done is on these countries. When it came to the legal and judicial culture, however, there were substantial differences between the Nordic and German states,because of for example the stronger position of Roman law in Germany and the larger role accorded non-professionals in passing judgement in Swedish courts. Although no significant difference is to be found between the Nordic and German states in regard to which point in time the liturgical and especially the clerical presence and actions were conceived as a problem it is clear that radical measures were considered and effected earlier in the German states. A possible explanation has its roots in the confessional situation of coexistence and conflicts in Germany. Hans Medick has written about how in the seventeenth century confessional conflicts could take the form of controlling the opposing confession, degrading it and its power in the public area.51 Thus attacks on and prohibition of earlier accepted religious practices in many parts of Germany were unexceptional. A question still not discussed, however, someone may ask, is exactly what period of time is studied here? Julia Smith has made a thoughtful comment on the question of time in history: ”Periodization can be the bane of the historian.”Smith also in her book, studying much of Europe in the centuries after the fall of Rome and thereby the western empire, 50 Zorzi 2007 p 49. 51 Medick 2006 p 372 sq. 34
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