Astrology and Reformation
Robin B. Barnes. October 1, 2015, Oxford University Press. Hardback $77.14
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.
"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 ofearly 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 ofexpectation and fear in which Luther's message resonated. For over a century after theReformer's death, Lutheran scholars--and pastors--turned to the stars as well as the Biblewhen they tried to predict what the future held."
--Anthony Grafton, Henry PutnamUniversity Professor of History, Princeton University
"This exciting new book highlights the neglected fact that astrological theorizing exploded inLutheran Germany. For a century or more almanacs and 'practicas' became part of aspecifically prophetic Lutheran world view. Scholars have too often ignored this upsurgeeither because astrology seemed superstitious and trivial or because it was regarded as sogenerically 'early modern' that it could not tell us anything about the Reformation. Byplotting the rise and fall of Lutheran astrology, Barnes brilliantly provides the first seriousstudy 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'sfascination with astrology. Not since Aby Warburg has a scholar understood so clearly howthe 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 developingmentalities and reforms of Protestantism."
--Philip M. Soergel, Professor of History, University of Maryland, College Park