Abstract
In 1550 the last Catholic bishop in Iceland was executed by Icelandic Lutherans and their Danish governors. After this event, the country on the outer fringes of the Danish kingdom yielded to a Reformation that had already been established in the other territories of Denmark and Norway. This chapter examines contemporary sources and modern scholarship in order to demonstrate that the success of the new movement was based on two principal factors. Firstly, this was a Reformation that was deliberately light on theology, a sidaskipti or “changing of fashions” as it came to be known in Icelandic. Secondly, it was an inevitable consequence of the growing national strength of the state of Denmark that was keener to establish a tighter grip on its territories than it had ever had before.
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Cunningham, J.P. (2020). The Sidaskipti: Iceland’s Change of Fashion. In: Kelly, J.E., Laugerud, H., Ryan, S. (eds) Northern European Reformations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54458-4_3
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