The Reformation and Protestant Religion
Protestantism has set its mark on Northern European culture for several centuries and is one of the faculty’s prioritized research areas.
Presentation of the research area
The scholarly treatment of its own religious tradition has long been a prioritized research field at the Faculty of Theology. This work has partly taken place with a view to gaining inspiration from the theological and religious sources of the protestant tradition, and in particular through work on protestant classics from older and recent history. But this has also taken place within the framework of an historical-critical research interest, in order to show how and why the protestant religion has changed: for example how the image of Luther and Lutheranism has been radically re-formed through its reception through the generations up until our own time.
The prioritized research area of the reformation and Protestantism makes up a new co-ordinated prioritization in this field. The prioritization takes place within an international context in close collaboration with relevant research environments in particular in the Nordic and Northern European countries. It also takes place within a marked interdisciplinary context, in collaboration with other disciplines such as history, art history, cultural history and philosophy.
Protestantism has set its mark on Northern European culture for a number of centuries, and is expressed in innumerable ways: not only in texts of various kind, but also in images, in architecture, in music and so on, in cultural codes and mentalities, in norms and conventions in politics and social life both in recent and in older history. It is crucial for this prioritized area to treat Protestantism in such a broad perspective, where a series of different cultural expressions are relevant for the research. Central research themes within the prioritized area are protestant religiosity, and in the 1500s and 1600s, protestantism’s relation to nation-building, the welfare state in the 1800s and 1900s, and protestant theology in the 1800s and 1900s.
Research projects
- Death in early Protestant Tradition (in Norwegian)
Networks
- Sixteenth Century Society & Conference
- Verein für Reformationsgeschichte
- Nordic Luther Network (Århus-based network with an emphasis on Luther-research)
- Netzwerk Reformationsgeschichte (German based network for young researchers)