Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/341

Rh national assembly, and the Lutheran religion was henceforth firmly established in Sweden.

The intellectual life that had been awakened by the struggle between the old and the new faith was followed by a literary activity that soon partly abandoned the religious field in which the movement had been inaugurated, and took up other subjects of more or less general interest. Printing had been introduced in Sweden in the latter half of the fifteenth century, and the first book printed in this country was a Latin work about Katarina, a daughter of St. Bergitta (Vita sive legenda cum miraculis Catharinæ), which was published in 1474. But a thoroughly equipped printing press was not established in Stockholm before the year 1491, and in 1495 the first book printed in Swedish appeared, the translation of a Latin work on the temptations of the devil. In 1520 there were already three printing offices, and thus the reformers were in no want of means for spreading among the people attacks on the Catholic church.

The bulk of the literature produced during the period of reformation consisted, as a matter of course, in works. They were partly dogmatical, or books for edification, and partly polemical, and as it was important to awaken a popular interest in this kind of reading, they were for the most part written in Swedish, while the learned literature consisted chiefly in disputations and was written in Latin.

The work of the three reformers mentioned above was of great importance, for especially by their translations of the Bible they laid a solid foundation for the development of a written language. This is particularly true of (1499-1573), who superintended the translation of the whole Bible and did the most of the work himself. This version was published in Upsala in 1540-41, while the New Testament had already appeared in a Swedish translation by (1482-1552) in 1526. Laurentius Petri was also the author of a series of theological works, but in this field he was greatly surpassed by his brother