It makes sense to consider the Reformation a phenomenon of print culture. The names of Wittenberg and Luther became
brands, according to the British historian Andrew Pettegree. Wittenberg prints spread rapidly all over Germany – and beyond. Without the printing press, the reformers’ chances of success would have been scant.
1 A. Pettegree, Brand Luther: 1517, Printing and the Making of the Reformation (New York, 2016).Having transferred all sovereignty to Denmark in 1536, when the Lutheran king Christian III ascended the throne, Norway became an integral part of the Danish dominion. Denmark, as well as neighbouring Sweden, imported their first German printer in the 1480s, which means that print culture was well established by 1537, however limited the spread of Danish prints. In the Church Ordinance of 1537 the king introduced censorship as a necessary precaution against any relapse into popery. He wanted to ensure complete control over all printing.
2 Ø. Rian, Sensuren i Danmark–Norge: Vilkårene for offentlige ytringer 1536–1814 (Oslo, 2014), p. 145. Consequently, no printer was permitted to set up shop outside the city walls of Copenhagen. It took one hundred years or so before the provinces had the opportunity to set up their own printing presses. In Norway it happened in 1643, when the first Danish printer arrived in Christiania, the capital. Bergen, the largest city by far in Norway (approx. 10,000 inhabitants in 1700), followed suit 78 years later in 1721. In both cases the catechism played a key role.
If a printer did decide to break out of the city walls of Copenhagen, he would need the king’s permission. Such permission was granted in part because the king needed printers for his grammar schools (
gymnasia) that had been set up around the kingdom to ensure the steady supply of qualified pastors to remote areas of the kingdom, far from the university in Copenhagen. Christiania’s first grammar school was established in 1636. Seven years later a Copenhagen printer by the name of Tyge Nielsen arrived in Christiania. Exactly how this came to pass remains obscure. The traditional version of the story hardly deserves credence: supposedly, a learned pastor by the name of Christen Bang, living some hundred miles north of the capital, summoned Nielsen to print his
opus magnum, Postilla catechetica, the first significant work to be published in Norway. Bang supposedly preferred this solution to his printing problem, however expensive it must have been. However, bringing a printer to establish himself in the provinces was no matter for a mere pastor, however ambitious he may have been. Granting privileges to print was the business of the king.
3 See E. Bjerke, ‘“Prentet udi Christiania”. Nye perspektiver på det første boktrykkeriet i Norge’, in T. Kr. Andersen et al. (eds), Bokhistorie. Bibliotekhistorie: En jubileumsantologi fra Norsk bok- og bibliotekhistorisk selskap (Oslo, 2019), pp. 7–20. In Christiania, like in Sorø, Aarhus and Odense in Denmark, the king needed a printer for his new grammar school.
Catechisms, hymnals and official announcements were the kinds of prints in demand by the commissioning authorities. Only a few of these articles have survived. Christen Bang’s monumental Postilla catechetica, though, may still be read, even in a digitised version. It is arguably the world’s largest catechism, an elaboration on Luther’s original spanning ten volumes and some 9,000 pages. It took twenty-two years and three printers to complete it.
The lack of preserved copies of catechisms and other primers applies not only to Christiania. Having searched through all relevant libraries and collections, in 2001 Charlotte Appel was able to register only
nine Danish-language copies of the
Small Catechism printed in the course of the seventeenth century. Yet we know the names of 23 printers who were active in Copenhagen during these years, and that between them they produced at least sixty editions.
4 Ch. Appel, Læsning og bogmarked i 1600-tallets Danmark, vol. 1 (Copenhagen, 2001), pp. 165–8. Books like these rarely became hereditary, as suggested by other print cultures, too: across the Atlantic, no copy of
The New England Primer printed before 1727 is known today, although several hundred thousand copies were produced before that date, the first edition having been printed in the late 1680s.
5 See L. Price, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading (New York, 2019), pp. 41–2.When Peter Nørvig, another Copenhagen printer, arrived in Bergen in the summer of 1721, it was at the invitation of the local authorities. They had summoned him to serve ‘the clergy as well as the students’, according to his application to the king.
6 A. Mohr Wiesener and H. Christensen, Et Bergensk Boktrykkeri gjennem 200 år (Bergen, 1921); H. Tveterås, Den norske bokhandels historie, vol. 1 (Oslo, 1950), p. 72. The reason for establishing a local printing house was the same here as it had been in Christiania: Bergen, too, needed printed catechisms, hymnals and official announcements. However, almost all of the early commissioned prints have failed to survive. What we do have from Nørvig’s initial years in Norway is Petter Dass’
Catechism Songs (probably 1722, the title page does not state a year). Nørvig must have considered it an economic necessity to go into trade publishing, having obtained privileges as a bookseller as well as a printer in 1722. Dass, the author, had passed away in 1707. Consequently, his book was not printed (in Copenhagen) until 1715. Emulating the German Johann Rist’s
Katechismus-Andachten (1656), Dass’ book comprises 48 songs set to popular tunes elaborating on Luther’s
Small Catechism. It soon became a bestseller, printed more than fifty times in the course of the century. Nothing seems to suggest it was required in school or church. People wanted it for their daily devotions, as suggested by the censor, whose approbation was regularly given on page 3 or 4. Nørvig printed Dass’ songs at least seven times in the 1720s, overcoming his initial financial troubles.
7 J. Haarberg ‘Earways to Heaven: Singing the Catechism in Denmark–Norway, 1569–1756’, in Ch. Appel and M. Fink-Jensen (eds), Religious Reading in the Lutheran North: Studies in Early Modern Scandinavian Book Culture (Newcastle, 2011), pp. 48–69.~
Plate 2.1. ‘A Catechisation’ as it appears in Niels Chr. Tønsberg’s Norske Folkelivsbilleder (The Way People Live in the Norwegian Countryside) according to paintings and drawings by Adolph Tidemand (1854). The famous collector of folk tales, Peter Chr. Asbjørnsen, was commissioned by the editor to comment on this particular motif. He has no problem imagining what is going on: ‘With the mien of a king and the true expression of a haughty schoolmaster the sexton is towering up among the children on the church floor. The one he is catechising, is mostly ignorant. He is one of those tall, lanky fellows who has outgrown his sense as well as his leather jacket which, slipping up from his waist, creeps over his wrists, away from his huge hands. He is hardly capable of answering “yes” and “no” in his turn. If he says more than that the result is the talk of a madman, fitting like “ax handle” as a reply to “good day, fellow”. The rest of them are watching and listening with attentive, gloating or pitying expressions.’
However late its arrival, the printing press made itself useful in Norway just like in neighbouring Denmark and Sweden. What seems peculiar to the Norwegian development is the role played by the catechism, especially, as we have seen, in the early days of printing. It did not stop there. Catechetical and devotional literature continued to dominate the book market until after 1814. When Martinus Nissen, university librarian in Christiania, published his survey in 1849 of the first four decades of postcolonial Norwegian literature, ‘Theology’ was still by far the largest category (21 per cent), with ‘Literature’ as in
belles-lettres in second place (16 per cent).
8 Martinus Nissen, ‘Statistisk Udsigt over den norske Litteratur fra 1814 til 1847’. Norsk Tidsskrift for Videnskab og Litteratur 3 (1849), 177–224, esp. pp. 180–1.