"Kill the Damn Masters!" : Narratives of Religious War and Social Conflict in Kvistbro parish 1843

Abstract: This thesis examines narratives of the events called ”The War of Religion in Kvistbro”, a violent turmoil that erupted in Närke, Sweden 1843. The events involved persons connected to the Shouter Movement, a pietist inspired revivalist movement, and governmental officials who were ordered to arrest a preacher.A narrative analysis based on a model inspired by Labov and Chatman, is used for examining contemporary local newspaper Nerikes Allehanda's and the revivalist historian E. J.Ekman's narrations of the events. The theoretical framework of this thesis is founded on Charles Tilly's theory of collective violence, and James C Scott's theories of hidden transcripts and weapons of the weak.The results of the analysis indicates that there are three main understandings of the events within the empiric material: a religious framing, a medical framing, and a socio-political reading. The socio-political reading of the narratives implies that the concepts medicine as control, social antagonism, and gender-coded aspects of conflict, emerge from the material.