Astrology and Reformation

by Robin B. Barnes

Overview

Winner of the 2016 Roland H. Bainton Book Prize of the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference

During 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, Robin Barnes 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199736058
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	11/02/2015
Pages:	408
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Robin Barnes grew up in Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey. A graduate of Colby College in Waterville, Maine, he received a doctorate in European history from the University of Virginia. Since 1980 he has lived in Davidson, North Carolina with his wife Ann Lee Bressler, the mother of their two grown children and also an historian. After family, friends, learning, and teaching, he harbors aspirations as a sailor and outdoorsman.

Table of Contents

Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

"For 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

"What can astrology possibly have to do with the Protestant Reformation? Robin Barnes has studied the immense amount of vernacular astrological and related literature still extant that was produced in German-speaking lands during the period ca. 1480 to ca.
1620 and finds that the answer is a lot, which makes this book important reading for not only historians of early modern science, but also for historians of early modern religion...Whether astrology from the late fifteenth through the early seventeenth centuries was a cause in the development of evangelical culture or a reinforcement of trends from elsewhere, Barnes has shown us that studying its role enriches our understanding of that culture."—Renaissance Quarterly

"In this learned and lively book, Robin Barnes ties the history of astrology to that of the Protestant Reformation. A flood of astrological predictions helped to create the culture of expectation and fear in which Luther's message resonated. For over a century after the Reformer's death, Lutheran scholars—and pastors—turned to the stars as well as the Bible when they tried to predict what the future held." —Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History, Princeton University

"This exciting new book highlights the neglected fact that astrological theorizing exploded in Lutheran Germany. For a century or more almanacs and 'practicas' became part of a specifically prophetic Lutheran world view. Scholars have too often ignored this upsurge either because astrology seemed superstitious and trivial or because it was regarded as so generically 'early modern' that it could not tell us anything about the Reformation. By plotting the rise and fall of Lutheran astrology, Barnes brilliantly provides the first serious study to connect these two efforts to understand our place in the cosmos." —Erik Midelfort, Professor of History, Emeritus, University of Virginia

"In this challenging study, Robin Barnes takes us on a tour of the sixteenth century's fascination with astrology. Not since Aby Warburg has a scholar understood so clearly how the deep tentacles of astrology affected all areas of sixteenth-century life. And like Warburg, too, Barnes understands well how profoundly the astrological mindset shaped the developing mentalities and reforms of Protestantism." —Philip M. Soergel, Professor of History, University of Maryland, College Park

"In contrast to the older view that the Reformation brought with it a 'disenchantment' of the world, Barnes uses his story to argue that, in the sixteenth century, we see a world 'neither traditionally enchanted, nor rationally disenchanted, but very differently enchanted from the one it worked to displace.' Barnes helps draw our attention to that difference in ways that should continue to inform the study of both science and the Reformation going forward." —Early Science and Medicine

From the Publisher