Lutheranism

I have to be honest: I’ve never been much concerned with what happened in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1387. I suspect that may even be true for many Lithuanians. In Silence of the Gods, Francis Young pinpoints this year – of the conversion of the duchy to Christianity – as the official triumph of Christianity in Europe over paganism and idolatry. But he then goes on to examine the debris – and the survivors of paganism and their traditions in the northern regions of Europe. The first difficulty is defining and identifying paganism. The book is published by Cambridge University Press, so there is an unmistakably academic, seminar-ready,

In the arctic borderlands in the 1800s Finns and Swedes have come to live among the Sami. Missionaries and traders, they have brought alcohol and Protestant teaching.  ‘Mad Lasse’ is what the locals call the preacher, and mostly they keep their distance, staying with their reindeer out on the tundra, following their ancient customs.  Some, though, have been awakened.  Hanna Pylvainen’s novel opens with Biettar, a Sami widower, brought to church by an earthquake – by a voice he heard among the tremors. In his fur trousers, stinking of smoke and reindeer, he falls to his knees before Mad Lasse, declaring himself with God. So the preacher exerts his pull,

‘Now tell us, you miserable wretched sack of maggots,’ wrote Thomas Müntzer, sounding like the love child of Owen Jones and Ian Paisley, ‘who made you into a prince over the people whom God redeemed with his own precious blood?’ The question Müntzer posed Count Albrecht of Mansfeld was, you’d think, rhetorical. Like his contemporary Martin Luther, if less unremittingly scatological, the radical millenarian preacher wielded a sharp pen. Don’t forget Ezekiel’s prophecy, he wrote to Count Albrecht’s brother Ernst: ‘God would command the birds of the air to feast on the flesh of the princes and command the unthinking beasts to lap up the blood of the bigwigs.’ Only