Johanna Svensson
Latin Letters from Clergymen in the Province of Scania (Eastern Denmark - Southern Sweden) in the Seventeenth Century. A Critical Edition with Introduction, Translation and Commentaries
Studia Graeca et Latina Lundensia 19
2015 | 430 p. | English

ISSN: 1100-7931
ISBN: 978-91-7580-751-5
Publisher: Artos & Norma

Lund university library houses a manuscript from the late seventeenth century that consists of eightyeight letters and other documents in Latin, in most cases written by clergymen from Scania, a Swedish province that until 1658 was part of Denmark. The externally rather insignificant manuscript has hitherto received very little attention, but the moth-eaten pages contain a fascinating collection of texts written by Lutheran clergymen to other Lutheran clergymen, created at the very core of the Lutheran confessional culture of the time. The letters and other texts about Holy Communion, weddings, christenings and churchings, difficult appointments, greedy noblewomen, stolen church ledgers and the feelings after the Treaty of Roskilde give us important glimpses of the everyday clerical life in war-torn seventeenth-century Scania.

This doctoral thesis contains a critical edition of the Latin text with introduction, English translation and commentaries, but it also provides analyses of specific groups of letters or other documents and, in some cases, analyses of individual letters. The aim in these analyses is to highlight information that gives a clue to the authors’ and recipients’ clerical identity.