Abstract
To most of the people who witnessed the spectacle, it seemed as if the order of nature had suddenly begun to crumble, as if the firmament were quaking and threatening to fall apart. An ‘inexplicable’ and ‘divine wonder’, exclaimed the astounded Tycho Brahe, a ‘rarer and greater miracle than anything that has occurred since the creation of the world’. Indeed, in the eyes of the Danish astronomer the remarkable sight was nothing but a presager of God, heralding the most dire times mankind had yet experienced: ‘wars, revolts, the capturing and death of sovereigns, the fall of empires and cities, tyranny, violence, felonies, fires, murders, plundering … sorrows, diseases, deaths, and all deplorable and horrible things’.1
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Notes
Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957; revised edition, 1970). Throughout this chapter, I treat ‘Millenarism’ and ‘Chiliasm’ as synonymous concepts, both denoting the idea that the final End would be preceded by a divinely instituted millennium of peace and happiness on earth.
Discussions of these shortcomings can be found in Robert E. Lerner, ‘The Black Death and Western European Eschatological Mentalities’, American Historical Review 86 (1981), 533–52,
and Robin Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), especially pp. 16–19.
See, for instance, Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), pp. 28–36.
Jole Shackelford, ‘Providence, Power, and Cosmic Causality in Early Modern Astronomy: The Case of Tycho Brahe and Petrus Severinus’, in John Robert Christiansson (ed.), Tycho Brahe and Prague: Crossroads of European Science (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Harri Deutsch, 2002), pp. 46–69.
Kenneth J. Howell, ‘The Role of Biblical Interpretation in the Cosmology of Tycho Brahe’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 29 (1998), 515–37
and Howell, God’s Two Books: Copernican Cosmology and Biblical Interpretation in Early Modern Science (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), pp. 73–108.
For a useful overview of the symbolic view of nature from antiquity to the early modern period, see Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). It should be noted, however, that Harrison’s main thesis — that the most important factor making ‘modern’ science possible was Protestant literalism, effectively undermining the idea of nature as symbolic — is too generalising and simplistic.
TBOO, vol. 1, especially pp. 161–63. For Augustine’s critique of astrology, see his Civitas Dei, 5.1–7. The literature on medieval and early modern astrology is vast, but for some useful overviews, see John D. North, ‘Astrology and the Fortunes of the Church’, Centaurus 24 (1980), 181–211;
Laura Ackerman Smoller, History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The Christian Astrology ofPierre d’Ailly, 1350–1420 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994);
Eugenio Garin, Astrology in the Renaissance: The Zodiac of Life (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983),
as well as the contributions in Paola Zambelli (ed.), ‘Astrologi Hallucinati’: Stars and the End of the World in Luther’s Time (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1986).
For an excellent discussion of the Philippist conception of astrology, see Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case o fPhilip Melanchthon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 124–73.
Cyprianus von Leowitz, De coniunctionibus magnis insignioribus superiorum planetarum solis defectionibus, & cometis, in quarta monarchia, cum eorundem effectuum historica expositione (Lauingen, 1564), especially sigs. M2v, N2v—N3r. Regarding early modern apocalyptic astrology, see Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis, pp. 141–81 and C. Scott Dixon, ‘Popular Astrology and Lutheran Propaganda in Reformation Germany’, History 84 (1999), 403–18.
For some useful overviews, see Robert E. Lerner’s ‘The Medieval Return to the Thousand-Year Sabbath’, in Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn (eds), The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 51–71,
as well as his essay ‘Millennialism’, in Bernard McGinn (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, vol. 2 (New York: Continuum, 1998), pp. 326–60. The influence of Joachim of Fiore has been treated thoroughly by Marjorie Reeves, especially in her classic The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (1969; revised edition, London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993). For the Old Testament prophecies about a Golden Age, see Micah 4:3–4 and Isaiah 11:6–9.
On the theologising tendency in late sixteenth-century astrology, see Robin Barnes, ‘Hope and Despair in Sixteenth-Century German Almanacs’, in Hans R. Guggisberg and Gottfried G. Krodel (eds), Die Reformation in Deutschland und Europa: Interpretationen und Debatten (Heidelberg: Gütersloher Verlaghaus, 1993), pp. 440–61.
Robert Scribner, ‘Reformation and Desacralisation: from Sacramental World to Moralised Universe’, in R. Po-Chia Hsia and R. W. Scribner (eds), Problems in the Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1997), pp. 75–92. For a more exhaustive critique of the Weberian view of the Reformation,
see also Robert Scribner, ‘The Reformation, Popular Magic and the “Disenchantment of the World”’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1993), 475–94. On the prominent role of astrology in Protestant religious propaganda, see Dixon, ‘Popular Astrology and Lutheran Propaganda’.
Charles Whitney, ‘Francis Bacon’s Instauratio: Dominion of and over Humanity’, Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989), 371–90.
See also Stephen A. McKnight, ‘The Wisdom of the Ancients and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis’, in Allen G. Debus and Michael T. Walton (eds), Reading the Book of Nature: The Other Side of the Scientific Revolution (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publications, 1998), pp. 91–109.
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Håkansson, H. (2007). Tycho the Prophet: History, Astrology and the Apocalypse in Early Modern Science. In: Killeen, K., Forshaw, P.J. (eds) The Word and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230206472_8
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