ABSTRACT
The first two chapters of this study offered a selective history of the Pietist movement and a survey of Pietism’s role in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Denmark. Those chapters depicted the Pietist background of Kierkegaard’s life and authorship, and this chapter, too, aims to contextualize the question of ‘Kierkegaard and Pietism’, focussing on Kierkegaard himself. Taking its cue from the latter half of Chapter 2, which establishes the Kierkegaard family’s connections to Copenhagen’s Brødresocietet, the chief task of this chapter is to explore how those connections made a tangible impact on Kierkegaard – a task it will approach largely, but not exclusively, by way of Kierkegaard’s reading of Erbauungsliteratur.
