Abstract
The opening quotation was written by Olof Celsius, president of the Stockholm Consistory. The Chancellor of Justice had consulted the Consistory concerning appropriate measures to be taken against religious enthusiasm, and at the meeting on 28 May 1776, Celsius read his draft reply to the Consistory, which approved the text without changes. The consultation was motivated by ecstatic religious movements in northern Sweden, but also the general presence of Moravianism, Swedenborgianism and free-thinking. The reply reflected the concern expressed by the Chancellor of Justice and proposed some measures to prevent further contagion; among others, stricter censorship and improved education of the clergy.
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Notes
J. Stitziel, ‘God, the Devil, Medicine, and the Word: A Controversy over Ecstatic Women in Protestant Middle Germany 1691–1693’, Central European History 29, 3 (1996) 309–37.
M. Heyd, ‘The Reaction to Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth Century: Towards an Integrative Approach’, Journal of Modem History, 53, 2 (1981) 258–80.
J. Goldstein, ‘Enthusiasm or Imagination? Eighteenth-Century Smear Words in Comparative National Context’, in Enthusiasm and Enlightenment, ed. L. E. Klein and A. J. La Vopa (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1998), pp. 29–49.
See B. R. Kreiser, Miracles, Convulsions, and Ecclesiastical Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978).
C.-L. Maire, Les convulsionnaires de Saint-Médard: Miracles, convulsions et prophéties à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard/Julliard, 1985).
Ph. Hecquet, Le Naturalisme des convulsions dans les maladies de l’épidémie convulsionnaire (Soleure, 1733), pp. 12–13, quoted from Goldstein, ‘Enthusiam or Imagination’, p. 39.
A. J. La Vopa, ‘The Philosopher and the Schwärmer: On the Career of a German Epithet from Luther to Kant’, in Enthusiasm and Enlightenment, ed. L. E. Klein and A. J. La Vopa (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1998), p. 87.
J. Goldstein, “’Moral Contagion”: A Professional Ideology of Medicine and Psychiatry in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France’, in Professions and the French State, 1700–1900, ed. G. L. Geison (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), p. 187.
See H. Schwartz, Knaves, Fools, Madmen, and that Subtle Effluvium: A Study of the Opposition to the French Prophets in England, 1706–1710 (Gainesville: The University Presses of Florida, 1978).
M. Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden, New York and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1995), p. 201.
See P. Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 1–10.
M. Pelling, ‘The Meaning of Contagion: Reproduction, Medicine and Metaphor’, in Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies, ed. A. Bashford and C. Hooker (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 15–38.
Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’, pp. 202–3; cf. A. C. Fix, Prophecy and Reason: The Dutch Collegiants in the Early Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
The following description of the Wiklund Awakening is based on C. J. E. Hasselberg, Norrländskt fromhetslif på sjuttonhundra-talet (Örnsköldsvik, 1919), pp. 239–475, and idem., Under Polstjäman: Tornedalen och dess kyrkliga historia (Uppsala: Lindblads, 1935).
Hasselberg, Norrländskt fromhetslif på sjuttonhundra-talet, p. 327; on her first vision, see D. Lindmark, ‘Vision, Ecstasy, and Prophecy: Approaches to Popular Religion in Early Modern Sweden’, ARV: Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 59 (2003) 177–98.
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Lindmark, D. (2005). The Preaching Disease: Contagious Ecstasy in Eighteenth-Century Sweden. In: Carlin, C.L. (eds) Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522619_10
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