Scott Douglas Jacobsen (Email: scott.jacobsen2026@gmail.com)

Publisher, In-Sight Publishing

Fort Langley, British Columbia, Canada

Received: December 16, 2025

Accepted: January 8, 2026

Published: February 22, 2026

Abstract

This excerpt examines how the Danish–Norwegian legal and ecclesiastical order translated patriarchal household norms into enforceable procedure, and then sustained those norms through parish-level surveillance. Tor Arne Jørgensen argues that Christian V’s Norwegian Law of 1687 did not create patriarchy but rendered it administratively legible by formalizing perpetual guardianship for unmarried women, prioritizing male-line authority in childcare guardianship, and limiting women’s contractual and economic autonomy except in the contingent legal space of widowhood. The interview then traces how sexual regulation operated in practice through the category of leiermål, where pregnancy functioned as decisive evidence and parish mechanisms—public confession, fines, and increasingly detailed church registers—produced gendered exposure and enduring stigma, including classificatory labels for “illegitimate” births. Moving to the pietist state church, Jørgensen frames compulsory confirmation (1736) and the school ordinance (1739) as intertwined instruments of religious formation and social discipline that elevated reading while often withholding writing, thereby creating a widespread but narrowly channeled literacy. The Conventicle Act (1741) further narrowed everyday freedoms by restricting unsupervised religious assembly, yet the Haugean revival demonstrated how literate lay networks could contest clerical monopolies in practice even before the law was formally repealed. Finally, the excerpt shows how charms, folk healing, and seafaring rites persisted under Lutheranism as pragmatic responses to vulnerability, prompting a pattern of selective intervention: condemnation in doctrine, uneven enforcement in law, and managed coexistence in daily life, particularly in rural settings where surveillance capacity and pastoral leverage were limited.

Keywords

Administrative discipline, Adult status, Authority, Bidragsprotokoll, Catechism, Child-support law (1763), Christian V’s Norwegian Law (1687), Christian VI, Clerical oversight, Conventicle Act (1741), Confirmation (1736), Court registers (tingbøker), Demonization, Discipline, Farskapsforelegg, Folk healing, Frillebarn, Gendered enforcement, Guardianship, Haugean revival, Horunge, Illegitimacy, Leiermål, Literacy, Moral policing, Omgangsskoler, Parish registers, Pietism, Public confession (Publice absolverede), Royal decrees, Sakefallslister, School Ordinance (1739), Seafaring rites, Sexual surveillance, State church, Superstition, Uskiftet bo, Visitation records, Widowhood, Writing restriction

Introduction

The Danish–Norwegian realm from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century offers a clear case of how law and church governance can operate as a unified regime of authority. Rather than treating patriarchy, sexual morality, and popular religion as separate domains, this interview excerpt approaches them as interlocking administrative practices: household hierarchy is stabilized through legal guardianship rules; sexual conduct becomes legible through parish discipline and recordkeeping; and religious conformity is reinforced through compulsory instruction, examination, and restrictions on unsupervised assembly.

Tor Arne Jørgensen situates Christian V’s Norwegian Law of 1687 within longer continuities of Norse inheritance and Christian marital doctrine while emphasizing what codification changes: it converts customary expectations into standardized procedure, narrowing women’s legal autonomy to exceptional conditions such as widowhood. He then tracks how “moral order” was produced not only by statutes but by enforcement routines—public confession, fines, and parish registers—that disproportionately exposed women and rendered pregnancy a primary evidentiary fact.

The excerpt further examines the pietist state-church program under Christian VI, where confirmation (1736), schooling (1739), and the Conventicle Act (1741) linked literacy and religious formation to discipline and eligibility for adult civic participation. Jørgensen also considers unintended consequences: the spread of reading competence facilitated lay movements such as the Haugean revival, which contested clerical monopolies in practice well before legal constraints were formally lifted. Finally, he addresses the persistence of charms, folk healing, and seafaring rites under Lutheranism, arguing that authorities often responded less through systematic suppression than through uneven, selective intervention shaped by local conditions and the limits of surveillance.

Main Text (Interview)

Title: Codifying Patriarchy and Policing Morality in Denmark–Norway: Tor Arne Jørgensen on the 1687 Law, Pietist Discipline, and Folk Practices (2)

Interviewer: Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Interviewees: Tor Arne Jørgensen 

Tor Arne Jørgensen is a Norwegian educator from Fevik, near Grimstad, in southern Norway. He teaches at secondary level and has written and spoken about history, religion, social studies, ethics, governance, and education for gifted students. He has participated in the international intelligence community since 2015 and is described as a member of 50+ high IQ societies. In 2019, the World Genius Directory named him “Genius of the Year – Europe.” He designs high-range IQ tests, including the site toriqtests.com, and is reported to have set Norway’s IQ score record twice. He is married and has two sons in Norway.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did Christian V’s 1687 Norwegian Law encode patriarchal household authority?

Tor Arne Jørgensen: Christian V’s Norwegian Law of 1687 did not invent the framework of household patriarchy; that structure had long existed, sustained by the interplay of Norse inheritance customs and later by Christian doctrinal models of marriage and authority. What the 1687 code accomplished was something more systematic. It transformed a set of social expectations into an administrative logic, embedding male authority so deeply into legal procedure that female autonomy could survive only in the narrow and historically contingent space of widowhood.

One of the most consequential shifts—radical in its implications rather than its vocabulary—was the legal redefinition of unmarried women. Under Magnus VI Lagabøte’s thirteenth-century code, both men and women reached majority at twenty. This did not amount to modern equality, but it recognized unmarried women as capable of acting in their own right. The 1687 law set this aside. Following Danish precedent, it placed all unmarried women under permanent guardianship. Age no longer produced legal independence; an unmarried woman, whether twenty or sixty, could not contract, manage property, or control her finances without male authorization. The category of the legally competent adult woman was simply removed.

The structure of guardianship itself reveals the priorities of the legislation. When the father died, guardianship over children passed not to the surviving parent but along a male lineage: first to an adult brother, then to the paternal grandfather, then to the maternal grandfather, followed by paternal uncles and finally maternal uncles. The mother could be appointed, but only by decision, not by right. Her authority over her own children existed at the discretion of others, not at the foundation of the law.

Marriage altered the form of guardianship but not the principle behind it. Authority transferred from father to husband, and the wife’s legal identity was absorbed into that of the household’s male representative. Her capacity to engage in economic activity was limited to the smallest transactions—amounts measured in a few øre (small coin amounts, the equivalent of only a few pennies)—as if she operated on the margins of the economic world rather than within it. The household’s property belonged to the marital unit in theory, but the husband alone could bind it through contract.

The inheritance rules of the 1687 code encoded similar assumptions. Sons received a double portion compared to daughters, described in the terminology of the earlier laws as the brother’s share (broderlod) and the sister’s share (søsterlod). This did not exclude women from inheritance, but it defined property transmission primarily through male lines. Even the assets that women did inherit typically came under the control of their husbands once they married.

Within this restrictive structure, widowhood emerged as the only circumstance in which a woman could exercise full legal capacity. A widow could manage her late husband’s estate, enter contracts independently, and—and this was often decisive—maintain the household as an undivided estate (uskiftet bo), retaining control of all property until her death or remarriage. Yet this autonomy was conditional. If she married again, the rights she had temporarily held dissolved, and her property passed into the authority of the new husband. The freedom widowhood offered was real, but it was also fragile, contingent on loss, and easily revoked.

The impact on noblewomen is illustrative. Under the medieval Land Law of 1274 and Town Law of 1276, women of noble rank had enjoyed significant economic latitude, able to buy and sell property with a freedom denied to women of lesser estates. The 1687 code erased this differentiation. All non-widowed women, regardless of birth, were placed under the same regime of guardianship. What had once been the privilege of class was replaced by the uniformity of subordination.

It is difficult to overstate how thoroughly these rules shaped the lives of women. They controlled whom a woman might marry, what she could own, and how she could act in the world. They rendered her legally visible only in relation to a male guardian: daughter, wife, or widow. And because the law grounded its prescriptions in Christian doctrine and royal authority, dissent could be dismissed not only as disobedience but as a challenge to divinely sanctioned order.

This framework remained largely intact for generations. Unmarried women did not receive majority status until 1845, and married women waited until 1890 to gain legal independence from their husbands. Even then, remnants of the older system persisted: the husband retained authority over the marital home, and the wife’s recognized independence extended primarily to the income derived from her own labor.

Christian V’s legislation did not create patriarchy; it rendered it legible, enforceable, and exhaustive. It transformed customary hierarchies into a legal architecture that defined women not as autonomous persons but as dependents within a carefully maintained moral and administrative order. And it would take nearly two centuries for that structure to loosen, and longer still for its assumptions to lose their hold. 

Jacobsen: Following from the previous question, what about moral policing in practice?

Jørgensen: The legal structure of Christian V’s 1687 Norwegian Law was one thing. Its enforcement—its quiet, repetitive, deeply embodied mechanisms—was something else entirely. It operated not as a theoretical system but as a lived one: a daily choreography of oversight that reached into bedrooms, labor quarters, and eventually into the birth chamber itself. And the weight of this system, its sharpest edges, fell most consistently on women.

The term used for sexual offenses was leiermål—a bureaucratic category for sexual relations outside of marriage. It covered a wide spectrum, from consensual relations between two unmarried people to adultery between married individuals. Yet the law never treated these acts equally. What mattered most was visibility. And nothing made a transgression more visible than pregnancy.

For an unmarried woman, pregnancy was an undeniable public fact. Her body revealed what the law preferred to bury beneath moral order. The man involved, however, could deny paternity, vanish, or—if he happened to be a soldier—avoid punishment altogether for a first offense. The asymmetry was deliberate.

Beginning in 1617, individuals accused of sexual misconduct were subjected to public confession before the congregation. Publice absolverede was the term. And to understand its force, one must imagine the scene: standing before neighbors, relatives, employers—standing before those whose eyes one would meet every week thereafter—and confessing aloud. The shame was not incidental. It was structural.

Women paid a fine of six daler; men paid twelve. On paper, it looks harsher for men. In practice, the burden fell almost entirely on women. By the late seventeenth century, unmarried soldiers were exempted from public confession. The woman—often a young servant with limited means—was left alone before the congregation, while the man who impregnated her either sat among the audience or was absent altogether.

I keep returning to this image. The young woman, visibly pregnant, standing alone.

The fines were entered into sakefallslister—lists of penalties paid—and the cases recorded in tingbøker, the local court registers. These sources show clearly who bore scrutiny. It was women whose names appeared most frequently, whose circumstances were interrogated in detail, whose movements and choices were captured on the page.

Until the mid-eighteenth century, women who had given birth were barred from church for roughly six weeks afterward. They were considered “unclean,” a concept drawn directly from Leviticus. After this period, mothers of legitimate children were formally reintroduced to the congregation in a purification rite. Mothers of illegitimate children received no such ceremony. Their path back to the community was through the public confession, during which they were expected to name the father before everyone present.

The parish registers themselves became instruments of moral classification. Early eighteenth-century records labeled illegitimate children as frillebarn (“child of a mistress”) or horunge (“child conceived through adultery”). From the 1820s onward, priests were required to mark each birth explicitly as “legitimate” or “illegitimate.” The child’s status—its moral inheritance—became a permanent notation beside its name.

Public confession for fornication was abolished in 1767, and the fines removed in 1812. But by then, generations had lived under a system that taught women that their bodies were potential evidence, that pregnancy outside marriage was not simply a misstep but an offense, and that their sexuality required both ecclesiastical and civil authorization.

The system was never enforced perfectly. Remote parishes, far from central oversight, recorded inconsistently. Wealthier families could arrange rapid marriages or pay quietly to resolve matters. It was poor women—servants, tenant farmers’ daughters, women without male protection—who carried the full weight of moral regulation.

Child-support laws introduced in 1763 created formal mechanisms for pursuing fathers. Records from these cases—farskapsforelegg (paternity proceedings) and bidragsprotokoll (child-support registers)—appear in the archives of each county governor. But even this reform reinforced the same pattern: women remained visible, accountable, documented. Men had to be located, identified, compelled.

At the center of all this was the priest. He kept the registers, received the confessions, and decided what to record and how. The parish register was not merely a list of births and deaths; it was a moral ledger, a continuous accounting of sexual conduct, legitimacy, and compliance.

When we speak of Christian V’s law placing women under perpetual guardianship—making them legal minors, absorbing their agency into male authority—we must understand that this was not a theoretical arrangement. It was enforced through precisely these practices: public shaming, financial penalties women could not afford, and records that labeled children as illegitimate before they could speak.

The law made patriarchy legible. The parish system made it operational.

And what of resistance? It existed, though often in shadows. Couples married hastily once a pregnancy became known, transforming sin into legitimacy. Women named false fathers to shield lovers or secure more reliable providers. Some priests minimized their notes, softening the record, perhaps recognizing the cruelty of the system they administered.

But these were deviations within the structure—not challenges to it. The underlying logic remained intact well into the nineteenth century: that sexual behavior required oversight, that pregnancy outside marriage was a matter for public judgment, and that women’s bodies were proper subjects of regulation.

What the 1687 law created in theory, the parish system enacted in practice. Together, they formed a regime of sexual surveillance that treated women less as persons and more as administrative concerns—entries to be recorded, monitored, and corrected.

The records remain. Thousands of them. Names, dates, fines, confessions. Each one a moment in which the machinery of moral regulation pressed into an individual life and left a lasting mark. 

Jacobsen: Did the 1736 confirmation rule raise literacy for empowerment or clerical control?

Jørgensen: The question poses a false dichotomy, as if we must decide whether literacy functioned as emancipation or surveillance. The reality is more disquieting: it was both at once, and it is precisely in that unresolved tension that an entire social order took shape.

When King Christian VI introduced compulsory confirmation in 1736 for all young people between fifteen and nineteen, he did far more than add another religious ritual to the calendar. He made confirmation a threshold to adulthood. Without it you could not marry, serve in the military, stand as a godparent, or testify in court. Fail the public examination, and you were sent back to study for another year. Reach nineteen without passing, and the authorities could put you in the pillory—or prison. 

Please consider the following scenario:  

Your passage into adult life—your ability to speak, to marry, to take responsibility—hung on a public examination conducted by a priest. Citizenship itself became conditional on doctrinal approval.

Erik Pontoppidan’s Sandhed til Gudfrygtighed, published in 1737, became the backbone of this system. It distilled Lutheran doctrine into a precise sequence of spiritual development—the “order of sanctification”—and it remained in use in Norway for more than 150 years. This was instruction designed not to cultivate independence but to form obedient subjects whose inner lives could be mapped, monitored, and corrected.

The School Ordinance of 1739 added another layer, requiring children aged seven to ten to attend primary schooling for at least three months each year. The directive emphasized religious and moral education above all else. Reading was compulsory; writing often was not. The asymmetry speaks for itself. Reading allows one to absorb the texts of authority. Writing allows one to produce one’s own—and that was far less welcome.

The practical reality was uneven. Rural parishes, lacking resources for permanent schools, adopted omgangsskoler, traveling schools that rotated from farm to farm. A teacher might stay a few weeks, then move on. Instruction focused almost entirely on memorizing catechism and decoding the printed word well enough to read aloud in church. The goal was competence, not independence.

And still, something quietly remarkable occurred.
By 1800, Norway had achieved a level of literacy that most of Europe would not reach for another century. Nearly everyone could read. In sheer numerical terms, it was an extraordinary success. But ask yourself: what kind of literacy was this?

People learned to read scripture, hymns, catechism, and royal proclamations. They could follow a sermon and understand a decree. But many could not write more than their names. They could not easily compose letters, petitions, or challenges to the official narratives that structured their world. They read the world given to them, but they seldom wrote one of their own.

Pietism, in theory, emphasized personal faith and inward sincerity. But in the Denmark-Norway of Christian VI, it became something tighter, more supervised. The Conventicle Act of 1741 prohibited all religious gatherings without clergy present. Personal piety was encouraged, but only with the priest looking over your shoulder.

So the priest became the fulcrum of the entire apparatus.
He examined the children.
He decided who understood enough to pass.
He alone could grant or withhold the document that opened the door to adult life.
The authority this placed in clerical hands is difficult to overstate.

Did compulsory confirmation empower people? In a limited sense, yes. Literacy—any literacy—creates cracks in the walls that contain it. Once a person can read, even if only religious texts, the skill has the potential to migrate. A hymnal can lead to an almanac, a catechism to a pamphlet, a sermon to a letter. The architects of the system could not fully control what they had unleashed.

But empowerment was not the intention. The system was designed for control, and the people at the time recognized this. Christian VI, intensely pietistic and personally austere, became one of the most unpopular absolute monarchs of Denmark-Norway. His motto, Deo et populo—for God and the people—rang hollow against the lived experience of compulsory piety and clerical oversight.

And yet the long arc bends in unexpected ways.
The very literacy the state sought to regulate made possible the Haugean revival in the early 1800s, which challenged clerical authority and emphasized lay preaching. The constitutional debates of 1814 drew on a population unusually well prepared to engage with political texts. The tools forged for obedience were later used for resistance.

This is the paradox at the heart of authoritarian education: once people can read, you cannot predict what they will do with the knowledge. You can attempt to shape the message, but not the mind that receives it.

The 1736 confirmation law sought to create a disciplined, compliant population. What it inadvertently created were the foundations for a literate civic culture. The intent was control. The result—much later, and against the design—was empowerment.

Between those two poles lies the space in which Norwegian modernity began to form.

Jacobsen: Following from the last question, what about the 1739 school law, too?

Jørgensen: The School Ordinance of 1739 completed the architecture of control that confirmation had already set in motion. It required children aged seven to ten to attend schooling for at least three months each year, with the curriculum weighted heavily toward religious and moral instruction. And here the system revealed its core intention: reading was compulsory; writing often was not.

The asymmetry is telling. Reading lets you absorb the texts of authority—scripture, catechism, royal decrees. Writing lets you produce your own, to question, to argue, to articulate dissent. One skill shapes you into a receiver of orthodoxy. The other makes you a potential author of alternatives.

On the ground, implementation varied. Rural parishes, lacking the means for permanent schools, adopted omgangsskoler—traveling schools that moved from farm to farm. A teacher might stay a few weeks, then continue on. Instruction centered almost entirely on memorizing catechism and decoding the printed word well enough to read aloud in church. The aim was competence, not independence.

The result was a narrow kind of literacy: sufficient to follow a sermon, to grasp a proclamation, to recite doctrine—yet limited enough that many could not easily compose letters, petitions, or challenges to the narratives that framed their lives. They could read the world handed to them. They could not readily write one of their own.

And still, by 1800, Norway had reached a level of literacy that most of Europe would not achieve for another century. Nearly everyone could read. In numerical terms, it was a remarkable achievement. But the lingering question is the same: what kind of literacy was this—and in whose interest was it shaped? 

Jacobsen: How did pietism under Christian VI narrow everyday freedoms?

Jørgensen: The Conventicle Act of 1741 added yet another layer of regulation to the structure that confirmation and the school law had already begun. Its purpose was simple, and its implications profound: no religious gathering could take place without the parish priest’s approval. Communal devotion was permitted—so long as it unfolded under clerical supervision. Spontaneous assembly, prayer led by laypeople, or gatherings shaped by personal interpretation were not.

This distinction reveals the heart of the system. Supervised piety reinforced existing hierarchies—priest, bishop, crown. Unsupervised fellowship created the possibility of alternative readings of scripture, of shared questioning, of a community not bound by the church’s official line. One form of devotion kept spiritual life tethered to the apparatus of the state. The other allowed it to grow in directions the authorities could neither predict nor control.

The law was justified as a safeguard against “radical Pietism,” a movement that emphasized personal religious experience and often encouraged laypeople to gather in homes for prayer, Bible reading, and mutual exhortation. In Denmark-Norway, such circles were not yet widespread, but their potential unsettled a regime committed to doctrinal uniformity. The fear was not disorder—it was autonomy. When ordinary people read scripture together without clerical mediation, they might reach conclusions that challenged the theological and political order.

Thus the decree drew its line with precision: only parish priests could lead religious meetings. Morning and evening family prayers remained lawful, but only if limited to the household. The presence of outsiders transformed a private devotion into an unauthorized assembly.

The result was a narrowing of spiritual space. People could pray, but within limits. They could gather, but only when permitted. They could cultivate inner piety—but only in forms structured, supervised, and sanctioned from above. The law granted enough religious practice to maintain conformity, yet withheld the freedom that would allow individuals to explore belief on their own terms.

And yet, the regime was not uniformly harsh by the standards of the age. The same Pietist current that inspired strict moral regulation also fueled social initiatives—charity schools, care for the poor, even early forms of organized welfare. Literacy would rise to remarkable levels within a few generations. But the underlying question remains unchanged: whose interests shaped these structures, and what forms of religious life were they designed to preserve—or to suppress?

What we see in the Conventicle Act is not an isolated decree, but another instrument in a broader system of surveillance. Confirmation made adulthood conditional on doctrinal mastery. The school law taught reading primarily to ensure reception of official texts. And now the 1741 act circumscribed religious fellowship itself. Each measure reinforced the others. Each served to ensure that spiritual life, like civil life, flowed through channels constructed by the state church.

The irony, of course, is that such systems rarely achieve what they intend. Literacy, once taught, lends itself to unexpected uses. Personal piety, once cultivated, cannot be entirely regulated. And religious longing, once awakened, will eventually find its own voice—often in defiance of the very authorities who tried to guide it.

The Conventicle Act sought to keep devotion contained. Instead, it marked another step in the long, uneasy tension between authority and conscience—one that would shape Norwegian religious life for generations to come.

Jacobsen: How did the Haugean revival contest the Conventicle Act’s limits?

Jørgensen: The Haugean revival did not arise on the margins—it emerged from within the very framework the Conventicle Act had been designed to secure. Yet from its earliest moments, it pushed against that framework in ways the law could neither anticipate nor absorb. Hans Nielsen Hauge’s first arrest came in 1794; the last in 1811. Between them lay a pattern of charges tied to a single infraction: preaching without clerical supervision. The boundary the decree had drawn—religious assembly only under pastoral authority—was crossed so frequently that enforcement became less a matter of discipline than of repetition.

The source of the conflict was not administrative but theological. In 1796 Hauge described receiving a spiritual calling that he believed authorized him to speak. This conviction cut against the principle the church defended: that religious authority flowed through ordination, not experience. The state viewed unauthorized preaching as a threat to order. Hauge viewed it as obedience to vocation. The two positions were not reconcilable.

What gave the movement its particular weight was the community that formed around it. People gathered in homes, barns, and fields to read scripture, pray, and listen to lay preachers—women among them. These meetings were not incidental violations; they were the substance of the revival. They created patterns of fellowship that operated alongside the state church, neither openly oppositional nor fully contained. The authorities could detain Hauge. They could not dissolve the networks that had begun to organize themselves around shared devotion.

The clergy recognized the tension. Hauge often informed local pastors of his intention to preach, acknowledging the existence of the law even as his actions contravened it. But this gesture did not alter the underlying dynamic. Attendance did not imply control, and supervision did not translate into authority. The meetings spread beyond any official oversight, carried forward by people who believed that spiritual life could be sustained without clerical mediation.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the contrast with parish life was becoming visible. In Christiania, a city of nearly ten thousand, fewer than twenty people might attend Sunday services. Formal worship persisted, but the sense of immediacy it once offered had diminished. The Haugean gatherings, by contrast, were participatory and text-centered, grounded in personal testimony and collective prayer. They offered a form of engagement that the established church had struggled to maintain.

The economic dimension of the movement added another layer. Haugeans founded mills, workshops, shipyards, and trading ventures, creating practical networks that echoed their religious ones. These enterprises gave the revival a degree of social presence that made dismissal difficult. When three men associated with the movement took part in the constitutional assembly in 1814, it signaled that the influence of the revival had extended into civic life as well as spiritual practice.

The Conventicle Act remained formally in force until 1842, but its authority had eroded long before. The law continued to exist; its capacity to shape religious life did not. The Haugean movement had demonstrated that devotion could flourish outside the channels the state sought to regulate, and that the line between permitted and forbidden assembly could be crossed not through rebellion but through persistence.

What followed was not a resolution but a shift. The revival did not dismantle the state church, yet it altered the relationship between institutional authority and personal faith. The law had been designed to preserve a particular configuration of religious order. The movement revealed how porous that configuration had become—and how readily spiritual life could reorganize itself when the structures meant to contain it no longer commanded the adherence they assumed.

Jacobsen: How did charms, folk healing, and seafaring rites, persist under Lutheranism?

Jørgensen: The persistence of charms, folk healing, and seafaring rites under Lutheranism did not represent a failure of doctrine so much as a recognition of where doctrine ended. The Reformation had redrawn the boundaries of legitimate religious practice, yet it left intact vast territories of daily life where the need for protection, remedy, and assurance remained unaddressed by formal theology. What the church could not provide, older practices continued to supply.

The theological position was clear. Lutheran teaching rejected the magical efficacy of ritual acts performed outside ecclesial authority. Charms, incantations, and healing formulas were classified as superstition—remnants of Catholic error or, worse, evidence of demonic influence. Yet clarity of doctrine did not produce uniformity of practice. In rural parishes, where clergy were scarce and medical knowledge scarcer still, people continued to turn to methods that promised tangible results. A blessing spoken over livestock, a charm sewn into a child’s clothing, a ritual performed before a voyage—these were not acts of theological defiance but responses to conditions the church had not equipped them to manage otherwise.

The clergy were aware of this. Visitation records from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries document cases of folk healing, the use of written charms, and rituals tied to agricultural or maritime cycles. Pastors condemned these practices in sermons and sought to replace them with approved prayers. But condemnation did not eradicate use. The gap between official teaching and lived religion was not a matter of ignorance alone; it reflected a deeper pragmatism. When a child fell ill or a ship prepared to sail, the immediacy of need outweighed the subtleties of theological correctness.

Women were central to this continuity. Healing knowledge passed through informal networks, transmitted from mother to daughter, neighbor to neighbor. These practices existed in a space the church could observe but not fully penetrate. A woman who knew how to stop bleeding with a spoken formula, or who could treat fever with herbs and invocation, held a form of authority that ordination did not confer. The church could call this magic; the community called it necessity.

Seafaring rituals presented a particular challenge. The sea demanded protection, and sailors developed practices intended to secure it—rituals performed before departure, prohibitions observed during the voyage, gestures made when passing certain landmarks. These acts were not framed as alternatives to Lutheran piety but as supplements to it. A sailor might attend church before a journey and still refuse to sail on an inauspicious day. The two practices occupied different registers, and neither cancelled the other.

What made these customs resilient was their embeddedness in social life. They were not codified systems but lived traditions, adapted to circumstance and transmitted through practice rather than text. The church could prohibit them in principle, but enforcement required a level of surveillance that was neither feasible nor, in many cases, deemed worth the effort. A pastor might preach against charms on Sunday and turn a blind eye to their use on Monday, recognizing that the alternative—confrontation with the entire community—would achieve little.

By the eighteenth century, the relationship had settled into an uneasy coexistence. Official religion provided structure, sacrament, and legitimacy. Unofficial practices provided what structure could not: immediate intervention, localized remedy, and the sense that the unpredictable forces of life and nature could be addressed through human action. The boundaries between the two remained contested, but they also remained porous.

The persistence of these practices did not reflect the weakness of Lutheranism so much as the limits of what any institutional religion could regulate. Doctrine governed belief; it could not govern every gesture made in a fishing boat or every word whispered over a sick child. The result was not syncretism in any formal sense, but a layered religious culture in which official teaching and unofficial practice occupied the same landscape without ever fully reconciling. The church claimed authority over the sacred. The people claimed the right to survival. OK

Jacobsen: Following from the prior question, how did authorities respond?

Jørgensen: The authorities responded not with systematic suppression but with a strategy that acknowledged what could not be eliminated. The persistence of charms, folk healing, and seafaring rites created a problem the church could neither ignore nor resolve through enforcement alone. What followed was a pattern of selective intervention—condemnation in principle, accommodation in practice.

The Lutheran clergy occupied the front line of this tension. Visitation records reveal a consistent awareness of unauthorized practices: healers who invoked sacred names, charms written on parchment and worn as protection, rituals performed at thresholds between seasons or before maritime departure. Pastors documented these cases, preached against them, and occasionally brought charges. Yet prosecution remained uneven. A healer might be reprimanded in one parish and tolerated in another. The deciding factor was often not the practice itself but the degree to which it threatened clerical authority or provoked complaint from within the community.

The legal framework supported condemnation but did not mandate rigor. Laws against superstition existed, rooted in both theological principle and concern for social order. Magic was framed as a form of deceit, a manipulation of the credulous, and in more serious cases, evidence of demonic pact. Application of these laws required resources the church did not always possess. In rural areas where a single pastor served multiple parishes, the capacity for surveillance was limited. A clergyman might know that folk healing continued in his district without being able to prevent it, and without being certain that prevention would serve any purpose beyond alienating those he was meant to shepherd.

Women who practiced healing occupied an especially ambiguous position. The church condemned their methods as superstition, yet it offered no alternative when illness struck and no physician was available. Prosecution tended to focus on cases where harm was alleged—where a treatment failed, where a rivalry turned accusatory, or where a healer’s reputation grew large enough to become a visible challenge. Most practitioners operated below this threshold, their work too embedded in daily necessity to invite sustained opposition.

The state’s involvement was intermittent. Authorities intervened when practices threatened public order or when accusations escalated into formal complaints. Trials for witchcraft and magic did occur, particularly in the seventeenth century, but they were fewer in Norway than in other parts of Europe. The prosecutions that did take place often centered on cases where maleficium—harmful magic—was alleged, rather than on the routine use of charms or healing formulas. A woman who treated illness with herbs and spoken blessings might be criticized; a woman accused of causing illness through supernatural means faced a different level of scrutiny.

Seafaring customs presented a parallel difficulty. The rituals sailors observed were not conducted in secret. They were performed openly, woven into the rhythms of maritime life. A pastor might preach that trust should rest in God alone, but he could not accompany every vessel to sea, nor could he offer a theological substitute for practices that sailors believed kept them alive. The church’s authority ended where the horizon began. On land, doctrine could be enforced through proximity and repetition. At sea, other forms of knowledge governed.

What emerged was a differentiation between practices the church could tolerate and those it could not. Healing that invoked Christ’s name or employed biblical language occupied a gray area—suspect, but not entirely beyond the bounds of acceptable piety. Practices that appeared to claim autonomous supernatural power, or that drew on pre-Christian symbols, faced stronger condemnation. Yet even here, enforcement depended on context. A charm might be overlooked if it served a benign purpose and did not challenge clerical primacy.

By the eighteenth century, the response had settled into managed coexistence. The church maintained its doctrinal opposition, preached regularly against superstition, and intervened when cases became visible enough to demand action. It did not mount a sustained campaign to extinguish folk practices. The cost of such an effort—in resources, in community relations, in the risk of driving practices further underground—outweighed the uncertain benefit of compliance. The clergy continued to preach. The people continued to act. The boundary between them remained contested, but it remained functional.

The authorities had recognized, perhaps without articulating it explicitly, that religious culture could not be governed by decree alone. Doctrine defined what was legitimate; practice defined what was necessary. The gap between them was not a failure of control but a reflection of the limits inherent in any attempt to regulate belief through institutional means. The church claimed authority over the sacred. The people claimed the means of survival. Neither side relinquished its position, and neither side prevailed entirely.

Discussion

Jørgensen’s account treats law and church governance as a single operating system: norms become durable when they are converted into routine procedure, recorded categories, and locally enforced consequences. In this framing, Christian V’s 1687 code matters less as a sudden invention than as a codifying technology—one that standardizes guardianship, channels authority through male lineage, and narrows women’s legal personhood to specific life-conditions (most notably widowhood). The argument’s force lies in its attention to how “household patriarchy” becomes not merely a social expectation but a procedural default, with dissent rendered intelligible as disobedience to sacralized law and royal order.

The same logic governs the section on moral policing. Here, the emphasis is not on abstract sexual norms but on visibility and documentation: pregnancy as unavoidable evidence, public confession as structured humiliation, and parish registers as moral ledgers that converted private life into administrative inscription. Jørgensen’s examples highlight the gendered asymmetry of enforcement, where men could evade, deny, or receive exemptions while women’s bodies and reputations remained the stable objects of scrutiny. The archival trail—fines, court books, visitation notes, and later paternity and child-support protocols—appears as a machinery of classification that outlasted the formal abolition of specific penalties.

The treatment of literacy under pietism extends this procedural emphasis into education and citizenship. Confirmation and schooling are presented as threshold mechanisms: participation in adult life is conditioned on doctrinal mastery assessed by clergy, while reading is promoted as access to authorized texts and writing is comparatively constrained as a means of producing unauthorized ones. Yet the excerpt insists on a historical irony: narrow literacy can still metastasize into wider agency. The Haugean revival illustrates how lay networks—enabled by reading, shared texts, and organized meetings—can erode the practical authority of restrictive laws even when those laws remain on the books. The concluding discussion of folk practice reinforces the theme of limits: institutional religion can condemn and occasionally prosecute, but it cannot fully replace the pragmatic rituals by which communities manage risk, illness, and the sea. What results is not total suppression but negotiated coexistence, shaped by resources, geography, local conflicts, and the practical costs of enforcement.

Methods

The interview was conducted via typed questions—with explicit consent—for review, and curation. This process complied with applicable data protection laws, including the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), i.e., recordings if any were stored securely, retained only as needed, and deleted upon request, as well in accordance with Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Advertising Standards Canada guidelines.

Data Availability

No datasets were generated or analyzed during the current article. All interview content remains the intellectual property of the interviewer and interviewee.

References

None submitted.

Journal & Article Details

Publisher: In-Sight Publishing

Publisher Founding: March 1, 2014

Web Domain: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com

Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada

Journal: In-Sight: Interviews

Journal Founding: August 2, 2012

Frequency: Four Times Per Year

Review Status: Non-Peer-Reviewed

Access: Electronic/Digital & Open Access

Fees: None (Free)

Volume Numbering: 14

Issue Numbering: 1

Section: A

Theme Type: Discipline

Theme Premise: Nordic Legal and Religious History

Theme Part: None.

Formal Sub-Theme: None.

Individual Publication Date: February 22, 2026

Issue Publication Date: April 1, 2026

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Word Count: 5,547

Image Credits: Tor Arne Jørgensen

ISSN (International Standard Serial Number): 2369-6885

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges Tor Arne Jørgensen for her time, expertise, and valuable contributions. Her thoughtful insights and detailed explanations have greatly enhanced the quality and depth of this work, providing a solid foundation for the discussion presented herein.

Author Contributions

S.D.J. conceived the subject matter, conducted the interview, transcribed and edited the conversation, and prepared the manuscript.

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

License & Copyright

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012–Present.

Unauthorized use or duplication of material without express permission from Scott Douglas Jacobsen is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links must use full credit to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with direction to the original content.

Supplementary Information

Below are various citation formats for Codifying Patriarchy and Policing Morality in Denmark–Norway: Tor Arne Jørgensen on the 1687 Law, Pietist Discipline, and Folk Practices (2) (Scott Douglas Jacobsen, February 22, 2026).

American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition)
Jacobsen SD. Codifying Patriarchy and Policing Morality in Denmark–Norway: Tor Arne Jørgensen on the 1687 Law, Pietist Discipline, and Folk Practices (2). In-Sight: Interviews. 2026;14(1). Published February 22, 2026. http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/codifying-patriarchy-policing-morality-denmark-norway-tor-arne-jorgensen-1687-law-pietist-discipline-folk-practices 

American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition)
Jacobsen, S. D. (2026, February 22). Codifying patriarchy and policing morality in Denmark–Norway: Tor Arne Jørgensen on the 1687 law, pietist discipline, and folk practices (2). In-Sight: Interviews, 14(1). In-Sight Publishing. http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/codifying-patriarchy-policing-morality-denmark-norway-tor-arne-jorgensen-1687-law-pietist-discipline-folk-practices 

Brazilian National Standards (ABNT)
JACOBSEN, Scott Douglas. Codifying Patriarchy and Policing Morality in Denmark–Norway: Tor Arne Jørgensen on the 1687 Law, Pietist Discipline, and Folk Practices (2). In-Sight: Interviews, Fort Langley, v. 14, n. 1, 22 fev. 2026. Disponível em: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/codifying-patriarchy-policing-morality-denmark-norway-tor-arne-jorgensen-1687-law-pietist-discipline-folk-practices 

Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition)
Jacobsen, Scott Douglas. 2026. “Codifying Patriarchy and Policing Morality in Denmark–Norway: Tor Arne Jørgensen on the 1687 Law, Pietist Discipline, and Folk Practices (2).” In-Sight: Interviews 14 (1). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/codifying-patriarchy-policing-morality-denmark-norway-tor-arne-jorgensen-1687-law-pietist-discipline-folk-practices. 

Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition)
Jacobsen, Scott Douglas. “Codifying Patriarchy and Policing Morality in Denmark–Norway: Tor Arne Jørgensen on the 1687 Law, Pietist Discipline, and Folk Practices (2).” In-Sight: Interviews 14, no. 1 (February 22, 2026). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/codifying-patriarchy-policing-morality-denmark-norway-tor-arne-jorgensen-1687-law-pietist-discipline-folk-practices. 

Harvard
Jacobsen, S.D. (2026) ‘Codifying Patriarchy and Policing Morality in Denmark–Norway: Tor Arne Jørgensen on the 1687 Law, Pietist Discipline, and Folk Practices (2)’, In-Sight: Interviews, 14(1), 22 February. Available at: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/codifying-patriarchy-policing-morality-denmark-norway-tor-arne-jorgensen-1687-law-pietist-discipline-folk-practices. 

Harvard (Australian)
Jacobsen, SD 2026, ‘Codifying Patriarchy and Policing Morality in Denmark–Norway: Tor Arne Jørgensen on the 1687 Law, Pietist Discipline, and Folk Practices (2)’, In-Sight: Interviews, vol. 14, no. 1, 22 February, viewed 22 February 2026, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/codifying-patriarchy-policing-morality-denmark-norway-tor-arne-jorgensen-1687-law-pietist-discipline-folk-practices. 

Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition)
Jacobsen, Scott Douglas. “Codifying Patriarchy and Policing Morality in Denmark–Norway: Tor Arne Jørgensen on the 1687 Law, Pietist Discipline, and Folk Practices (2).” In-Sight: Interviews, vol. 14, no. 1, 2026, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/codifying-patriarchy-policing-morality-denmark-norway-tor-arne-jorgensen-1687-law-pietist-discipline-folk-practices. 

Vancouver/ICMJE
Jacobsen SD. Codifying Patriarchy and Policing Morality in Denmark–Norway: Tor Arne Jørgensen on the 1687 Law, Pietist Discipline, and Folk Practices (2) [Internet]. 2026 Feb 22;14(1). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/codifying-patriarchy-policing-morality-denmark-norway-tor-arne-jorgensen-1687-law-pietist-discipline-folk-practices 

Note on Formatting

This document follows an adapted Nature research-article format tailored for an interview. Traditional sections such as Methods, Results, and Discussion are replaced with clearly defined parts: Abstract, Keywords, Introduction, Main Text (Interview), and a concluding Discussion, along with supplementary sections detailing Data Availability, References, and Author Contributions. This structure maintains scholarly rigor while effectively accommodating narrative content.