When Martin Luther's protest began making an impact in Scandinavia in the 1520s, this region belonged to the religious and political periphery of Europe. A century later the Nordic countries had become of paramount importance to European Protestantism, and it was the intervention of Lutheran Scandinavia in the Thirty Years' War which helped secure the survival of European Protestantism. This volume describes how the Nordic countries came to be solidly Lutheran states by the early seventeenth century; how the evangelical movements differed and succeeded, and the different pace of reform and its institutionalisation. It offers a revisionist view of the role of the Catholic Church in Scandinavia, and its attempts to halt the reformation, and demonstrates the difficulties facing the new Lutheran churches trying to convert a conservative, peasant population to Protestantism.

"The product of a team of Scandinavian scholars, this book is a compact and well-integrated introduction to the Reformation in Scandinavia." Choice

"The contributors to the volume are well-established Nordic scholars within the fields of history and church history....the volume includes an impressive amount of information and would seem a good introduction to sixteenth-century Scandinavian church history for the English speaking reader....on the whole, the volume should be most readable to anyone with an interest in the history of the Reformation." Jonas Alwall, JOurnal of Church and State

"This volume is a welcome addition to the literature available in the English language devoted to the Scandinavian Reformation....the present volume greatly illuminates the English-speaking reader's understanding as to how and why the Catholic Church disappeared in Scandinavia within two decades of the onset of evangelical preaching." Trygve R. Skarsten, Church History