Within early modern Lutheranism, the household took on special importance. Indeed, Luther’s three estates paralleled the married couple alongside the state and the church: equal before God, these estates were governed by a structurally similar and divinely ordained authority: the prince, the husband, and the priest. Thus, these three figures of authority engendered multiple overlapping jurisdictions, which in turn shaped the borders between public and private. Of course, the overlap between the domestic sphere, ecclesiastical policies and civil society was no Lutheran invention: a similar overlap can be identified in Aristoteles, and his medieval and early modern commentators were certainly not blind to it. Nevertheless, Lutheran theologians and jurists developed a new vocabulary for thinking about the household and its position within the social world, which influenced the everyday life and practice of families and would pave the way for the 19th-century construction of the family as a separate entity within the Scandinavian countries.
In our contribution, we propose to study the household as a ‘private’ jurisdiction, and the relationship between this jurisdiction and the ‘public’ jurisdiction of the state. More specifically, we investigate the scope and extent of paternal authority within the household and the reconceptualization of marriage governance in the broader context of early modern Lutheran societies. The article includes three main sections. A first section outlines the Lutheran theory of the household as initially developed in Luther’s writings on Genesis, the Song of Songs, the Gospel of Matthew and the treatises on marriage, but also in Melanchthon’s commentaries on Aristoteles. A second section briefly traces the figure of the father and the status of the married couple in 16th-century theologians and jurists like Erasmus Sarcerius (1501-1559), Niels Hemmingsen (1513-1600), Joachim von Beust (1522-1597), and others. A third section documents how key developments were accomplished in 17th-century works like De jure connubiorum commentarius politicus by Henning Arnisaeus (1570-1636), De coniugio clericorum tractatus by Georg Calixtus (1586-1656), and the Biblische Policey by Dietrich Reinking (1590-1664). The latter work was dedicated to the Danish king Frederik III and can be viewed as an almost epitome of the scholarly discourse on the household, which we propose to elucidate.