BB writes that QMII has been approached by the church in Wittenberg for her to design a antependium for the altar.
Dronning Margrethe skal designe nyt alterbordsforside | BILLED-BLADET
The occasion is that in two years it will be 500 hundred years ago Martin Luther nailed his 95 thesis to the door to the castle-church in Wittenberg and started the Reformation. (*)
In Denmark the Reformation officially took place in 1536. (**)
QMII's antepedndium will be unveiled in October next year.
Wittenberg Church:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittenberg
(*) As you know there were several attempts of a reformation before that. Some starting back in the 1300's. Spurred on not only by members of the clergy and intellectuals but also the Hussitter rebellion in the 1400's and the large peasant rebellions in the early 1500's in southern Germany. - Some claim that the authoritarian mindset in Central Europe is a result of the brutal suppression of these rebellions. Where every attempt of establishing a kind of parliamentarianism was kept down.
(**) The Danish Reformation took place during a vicious civil war for the throne, where on top of it all a central European inspired public rising also took place. The uprising initially met with some success but was eventually crushed by professional mercenaries. - And that was the last public rebellion in Denmark.
Before then there had been countless minor local uprisings all over the country whenever people were dissatisfied, because every free man was armed. These uprising were usually fairly bloodless. Perhaps a noble farm or two torched, a noble or a magistrate beaten up and a in few cases killed, until a representative for the king arrived and sorted things out. - After which people came to some kind of compromise and helped rebuild whatever was destroyed. That had been the order of the day for some 600 years, but by the 1530's that was over! Now courts were to take over and the general public was disarmed and the defense of the realm left in the hands of professionals and conscripts, who were armed as needed by the king.
But in contrast to so many other places the introduction of the Reformation was surprisingly quiet and civilized here in DK. With a smaller population the distance between people, lawmakers and clergy was short.
So a number of monasteries were seized by the king and a number of the most hardcore Catholics were quietly shipped south, but there was little if any looting and little if any violence.
As for monks and nuns, they were simply allowed to live in their monasteries until they died, after which the king officially took possession. So by the 1570's or so, there were no monks left and the Reformation was completed.
But it was soon realized after the Reformation that the state had to step in and take over from the (Catholic) church, because monasteries had provided a rudimentary form of social security for the poor and sick. So in a sense you can say that the welfare state was founded during the mid 1500's here in DK.
Linear Mode
