Partly overlapping with LUMEN's Danish project on Lutheranism and the development of society in Denmark, Nina J. Koefoed, Gorm Harste and Bo Kristian Holm from the Danish project collaborated with Urban Claesson and Karin Hassan Jansson from church history and history respectively at Uppsala University. The aim was to use the results of the Danish project for a comparison with the only other Lutheran monarchy, Sweden.

The result was a new thesis for understanding the development of Scandinavian society: that the Nordic household states were variations on the same Lutheran motifs.

According to the book, Martin Luther's view of society as a household led by parents established a model of social organisation that became widespread in the Nordic countries in the 17th and 18th centuries. When the Nordic monasteries were dismantled with the Lutheran Reformation, the household became the new framework for Christian life. The Ten Commandments replaced monastic rules, morning and evening prayers replaced monastic prayers, and the household became the given and legitimate form of community and organisation. The relationship between parents and children thus became normative far beyond what is now called the family.

If the household state is introduced here as an analytical concept, it is partly to describe a theologically grounded state that was both organised as a household and consisted of, and was based on, small households. And partly to capture the fact that what the book calls household culture shaped both the individual household and the state as a whole.

In older Nordic scholarship, the central role of the household in early modern society is usually associated with the Swedish church historian Hilding Pleijel and his thesis of the 'world of the table of duties'. On the basis of new research, the authors of this collection confirm Pleijel's basic assumption. But they do so in a way that Pleijel himself could hardly have imagined. The anthology begins with two chapters that update the state of research. The following chapters examine the historical and contemporary theological role of the household at various levels in the early modern period - in everyday life, in church doctrine, and in the overall organisation of the state.

The studies combine research from Denmark and Sweden and offer comparative perspectives on the organisation of the household in each realm. Since the 16th century, both the Swedish and the Danish household states have been in conflict and have shared a Lutheran confession. There are both similarities and differences between the two kingdoms. For example, it is a common Nordic feature that households were not run by fathers alone, but by both parents.

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