Description
Book SynopsisDuring the sixteenth century, no part of the Christian West saw the development of a more powerful and pervasive astrological culture than the very home of the Reformation movement--the Protestant towns of the Holy Roman Empire. While most modern approaches to the religious and social reforms of that age give scant attention to cosmological preoccupations, this study argues that astrological concepts and imagery played a key role in preparing the ground for the evangelical movement sparked by Martin Luther in the 1520s, as well as in shaping the distinctive characteristics of German evangelical culture over the following century. Spreading above all through cheap printed almanacs and prognostications, popular astrology functioned in paradoxical ways. It contributed to an enlarged and abstracted sense of the divine that led away from clericalism, sacramentalism, and the cult of the saints; at the same time, it sought to ground people more squarely in practical matters of daily life. The art gained unprecedented sanction from Luther''s closest associate, Philipp Melanchthon, whose teachings influenced generations of preachers, physicians, schoolmasters, and literate layfolk. But the apocalyptic astrology that came to prevail among evangelicals involved a perpetuation, even a strengthening, of ties between faith and cosmology, which played out in beliefs about nature and natural signs that would later appear as rank superstitions. Not until the early seventeenth century did Luther''s heirs experience a crisis of piety that forced preachers and stargazers to part ways. Astrology and Reformation illuminates an early modern outlook that was both practical and prophetic; a world that was neither traditionally enchanted nor rationally disenchanted, but quite different from the medieval world of perception it had displaced.
Trade ReviewFor most sixteenth-century Lutherans, the stars were a God-given text that complemented the Bible, a text that mirrored both the divine order of the world and its imminent disintegration. Robin Barnes has argued convincingly that we cannot properly understand the historical realities of the Reformation unless we open our eyes to this aspect of their faith. * William R. Shea, Fides et Historia *
Astrology and Reformation will be an enjoyable and instructive resource for every scholar of the long 16th century. * Eugene D. Hill, Religion *
Table of ContentsContents ; Acknowledgments ; A Note on Sources ; Introduction ; 1. From Athens to Augsburg ; 2. Mathematics and the Sacred ; 3. The Flood ; 4. The Campaign against Superstition ; 5. Confessional Constellations ; 6. Fate and Faith ; 7. Centrifugal Forces ; Postscript ; Literature ; Index
