[Book Review]: "In the story of war: Church and propaganda in France and Sweden, 1610–1710"

Abstract

In The Story of War: Church and Propaganda in France and Sweden, 1610–1710, Anna Maria Forssberg contrasts and compares two similar seventeenth-century institutions—French Te Deum and Swedish tacksägelsedagar, “days of thanksgiving.” In both countries these ceremonies were ways in which monarchs made use of the institutional structure of the church in order to communicate with their subjects regarding matters of peace and war. This was how victories on the battlefield were celebrated but also how information and propaganda were disseminated to people at large. Forssberg’s is a quasi experimental method: by keeping one variable—the ceremony—constant, she can investigate how other variables differed in the two cases. In this way, more than being just a study of Te Deum and...