Astrology and Reformation

Abstract While most modern approaches to the religious and social reforms of the sixteenth century give scant attention to stellar preoccupations, this study argues that astrological concepts 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 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; it also sought to ground people more squarely in practical matters of daily life. The art gained unprecedented sanction from Luther's closest associate, Philipp Melanchthon, who influenced generations of preachers, physicians, schoolmasters, and literate layfolk. While Catholic and Calvinist clerics increasingly sought to restrict popular attention to the stars, most Lutherans promoted an art they valued as both practically and spiritually beneficial. But the apocalyptic astrology they came to embrace involved a perpetuation and 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. Only after 1600 did Luther's heirs experience a "crisis of piety" that forced preachers and stargazers to part ways. This book illuminates an early modern outlook that was both practical and prophetic, a world neither traditionally enchanted nor rationally disenchanted, but quite differently enchanted from both earlier and later patterns of perception.