Promoting individualism under the guise of uniformity: A bishop's instructions in late eighteenth-century Sweden

The ways in which a bureaucratic model of oversight could be turned into a vehicle of individualizing religious practices in late-eighteenth-century Sweden is the central concern of this chapter. It focuses on how bureaucratic measures could be used to implement enlightened reform, thereby offering a different perspective on ‘pastoral Enlightenment’ in the rural European North. By examining how Olof Wallquist, a late-eighteenth-century Swedish bishop, used his position as an ecclesiastical superior to promote change, a novel perspective on the blending of individualism and confessional culture is offered. This testifies to a process of gradual, microscopic, dislocations in which key elements of a previous social order were overtaken, step by step, by different standards of behaviour.