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James A. Brundage, Anne Irene Riisøy. Sexuality, Law and Legal Practice and the Reformation in Norway. (The Northern World: North Europe and the Baltic c. 400–1700 AD, Peoples, Economies and Cultures, number 44.) Boston: Brill. 2009. Pp. vi, 212. $132.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 3, June 2010, Pages 905–906, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.3.905
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Anne Irene Riisøy sets out to challenge the conventional view among Norwegian historians that the Reformation introduced radical changes in the way that church and state authorities in Norway dealt with aberrant sexual behaviors. She contends that, on the contrary, the Protestant reformers created no new sex crimes and made few substantial changes in the way that the medieval church had dealt with sex offenses since roughly 1250. Reformation Norway, she argues, was in this respect remarkably conservative both in theory and practice. Such changes as there were, Riisøy notes, were gradual and incremental. The only major innovations that she found in Norwegian sex law during the Reformation were the legitimation of clerical marriage and the abandonment of fasting, pilgrimages, and pious works as punishments for sex offenses.
To support her argument Riisøy relies on legal texts and records of practice. The legal texts that she employs are primarily Norwegian, although she does refer at times to Danish, Icelandic, and Swedish laws for purposes of comparison. All of these are written in the vernacular, and she scarcely mentions the Corpus iuris canonici or other Latin legal texts. Her evidence for Norwegian legal practices in dealing with sex crimes emerges from records of prosecutions in regional court assemblies, records of fines in account rolls of fiefs and rental books for church property, as well as trials before the king and royal council. These sources furnished her with a total of ninety-six pre-Reformation sex cases and 796 such cases from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
