the execution and its message other reasons. In Kalmar the prison chaplain in 1850 noted that a condemned was not interested in attending the service on the Sunday preceding the execution, but the chaplain concluded that this choice was the result of bitterness and grievances.310 This is also a late Swedish example of the real possibility of acondemned sermon being given. In Uppsala the previous year there is an example of a service we could call a condemned sermon. At a Sunday service the condemned, Djos Per Andersson, chose the text for the sermon and two of the four hymns that were sung.311 In literature on pastoral care we can find sympathy for the condemned who wished to excuse them self from the public eye and thus, in some cases, from divine services. The condemned could feel disturbed in their devotion, and the public in its curiosity and, possible, admiration could act as a temptation to the vain.312 The culture and setting of the condemned sermon were increasingly linked to the prison, highlighting it as a society of its own. In the cellular prison of Amsterdam, the protestant prisoners one Sunday in 1854 heard a sermon on the executed delinquent Johann Heinrich Kemper. He was put forward as an example to take warning from.313 The night before the execution of Theodor Julius Sallroth in 1900 a ’dödsbetraktelse’ over Lk 23:39–43 was delivered for all the prisoners of Karlskrona prison.314 These can be seen as modern forms of the condemned sermon adjusted to the new prison culture, with a prison more detached from society, even forming a community in itself. The history of prisons differs and especially the new cellular prisons seem to have made a substantial difference in the culture, when it came to worship, but in Sweden I would estimate that up to the mid-nineteenth century the huge majority of all official services involving the condemned were held in parish churches near the execution site. 310 Notes 22 and 23 March 1850DId:1 Fångvårdsanstalten i Kalmars arkiv VaLA. 311 Löfvén 1853 p 8 sq. 312 Henschen 1800 p 69, Norrby 1899 p 417 sq. 313 Mohrmann 1854, see also on the case Eeghen 1965. 314 Relation by Nils Thorén 31 December 1900EIIcb:32 Fångvårdsstyrelsens arkivRA, ’short reflection on death’. 98
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