Eva Margareta Frölich

Eva Margareta Frölich, (c. 1650-Stockholm, September 1692), was a Swedish mystic, a fortune teller, prophet, visionary and Pietistic writer.

Biography

Frölich was born the daughter of colonel Hans Christoffer Frölich and Elisabet von Plessen. The location and exact date is unknown. Her brother, Karl Gustaf Frölich, was ennobled count.

She was married in Riga in Latvia, then a Swedish Province, with Johann Henning Neumeijer, colonel in the Swedish army, whom she abandoned in 1684, when she arived in Stockholm in Sweden in the company of the goldsmith Berendt Doerchmann and made herself known as a prophet and a preacher. She was received by king Charles XII of Sweden, where she predicted that he was to be the founder of the Thousand year Kingdom of Christ and rule over the entire christianity. The same year, she was sentenced to exile and traveled to Hamburg, where she published her work about millennialism and the seven congregations in the bible, which caused her banishment from the city. She then settled in Amsterdam, where she published many of her work and continued to be active as a prophet and a preacher, still assisted by Berendt Doerchmann.One of her oppinons was, that women should be allowed to preache. [Karin Westman Berg, "Sophia Elisabeth Brenner", "Författarnas litteraturhistoria", red. L.Ardelius och G.Rydström, Författarförlaget 1984, s.66]

Return

She returned to Stockholm in 1692, where she held speeches against the priests "almost worse then before" and tried to publish her work. She was arrested and put in jail, where she died the same year.

Her theology has ben described as a mix between spiritualism, pietism, ortodoxy and the punismentideology from the Old testament. She was a Lutheran, but attacked the literary version of the priests. [Ellen Hagen, artikel i "Svenska män och kvinnor", del 2, Albert Bonniers förlag 1944, s.637]

References

*Nordisk familjebok

Notes