Sacrilege – from missals to monks’ covers
This exhibition was jointly produced by the Swedish National Archives and the Museum of Medieval Stockholm.
19/2 –93 – 23/1 1994
Using as its basis the parchment covers, the exhibition described the kind of setting in medieval Sweden where the manuscripts had once been used and looked after. The covers are taken from the books of the day, read and used for long periods of time.
In Västerås, in 1527, King Gustavus Vasa forced through the resolutions which broke the power and influence of the Catholic Church in Sweden. During the following decades the Church lost its land and its independence. Sweden obtained an Evangelical-Lutheran State Church. The clergy became civil servants of the Crown, the monasteries were closed down and the treasures of the churches were confiscated in order to pay the large foreign debt. Libraries, too, were emptied. The books belonged to the old order and were therefore unuseable – perhaps even dangerous. They were taken to pieces and turned into covers for the bailiffs’ tax accounts. Subsequently they lay in the Exchequer archives for hundreds of years, maltreated and regarded as worthless, until rediscovered at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Many books, perhaps the majority of them, had been imported into Sweden. Priests and monks had been sent out to the Continent to purchase books for their churches and monasteries. Swedish students returning home from universities in France, Spain and Italy took the books they had studied back with them. Some books, possibly, had already come with the missionaries from England and Germany. These are the remains of a common European culture which – within the framework of the Catholic Church – also embraced Sweden for 500 years.