Niels Hemmingsen and the Construction of a Seventeenth-Century Protestant Memory

Abstract

Abstract Danish reformer Niels Hemmingsen was a Lutheran, but owing to Pan-Protestant sentiments that became apparent in his later writings, he found an appreciative audience in non-Lutheran Western Europe during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This article argues that the early modern European reception of Hemmingsen and his theology should be seen as an attempt to construct him as part of a Protestant memory. It also argues that in order to understand the dynamics behind the reception of Hemmingsen’s ideas, one has to consider the geopolitics of early modern Denmark. Due to her strategic setting in Northern Europe, Denmark played a vital role in controlling commerce and politics between the North and Baltic Seas. Arguing for a “Western” perspective, the article shows how Hemmingsen’s case substantiates that the Danish Reformation involved both importing Lutheranism from the South (Saxony), and exporting it to the West (The Low Countries, England).