Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1957, Qupperneq 22

2
INTRODUCTION
A hopeless struggle agalnst this development was waged by
representatives of the old leading families, whose position was
weakened from the beginning by the faet that members of the
clergy sided in general with the royal power. In order to save as
much as possible for the Church, the Lutheran bishops tried as
a rule to keep on good terms with the Crown, even though this
might lead to open conflict with their own countrymen, who were
struggling to maintain the land’s ancient rights of self-govern-
ment1. The general economic decline which resulted from the
government’s policy of exploitation feil also on the old chief fam-
ilies and weakened them in their dealings with the royal power.
In addition, it so happened that most of the royal officials were
recruited from amongst their ranks, so that they lost still further
both the opportunity and the zeal for active resistance.
In the intellectual sphere in Iceland the effects of the Reform-
ation were not perhaps so immediate, but in time they were
equally decisive. Almost all education had previously been in the
hånds of the Catholic Church, and the humanistic tendencies
which had begun to reveal themselves in Scandinavia before the
Reformation were but little known in Iceland. In the years im-
mediately preceding the Reformation comparatively few Iceland-
ers had studied at foreign universities, and it is impossible to say
of any single university that it was the preeminent centre of learn-
ing for Icelanders. The champions of the Reformation in Iceland
had, it is true, received a certain humanistic education, but their
chief interest lay in theology, not in the general outlook of hum-
anism nor in its approach to the study of history, the field in
which humanism was to make its most important contribution in
Scandinavia. The educational system in Iceland remained in cleri-
cal hånds after the Reformation, when it was reorganised on the
lines laid down in Christian IH’s Church Ordinance. Regular
cathedral schools were established at the two episcopal seats, but
these were the only schools founded. There was inevitably a great
need for priests trained in the new doctrine—it is difficult to be-
lieve that a real change of heart was felt by more than a few of
the older priests, even though they had yielded before a mission
1 See further on this topic PE(31. Mom. III 1-423.