ABSTRACT
Recent work on the astronomer Tycho Brahe has emphasised his relationship to the Lutheran tradition of astronomical and astrological investigation usually associated with the scholarship and curricular reforms of Philipp Melanchthon.1 The importance of this tradition to the reception of Copernican astronomy and to the transformation of the study of celestial phenomena in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has long been recognised.2 Yet, historians remain divided about how best to describe it. Some have been happy to label it a Lutheran mode of studying the heavens – part, indeed, of a Lutheran tradition of natural philosophy.3 Others, however, for reasons spelled out particularly clearly by Charlotte Methuen, have favoured a more cautious approach. With Luther himself largely indifferent to academic study of the natural world, and actively hostile to the scholastic traditions of natural and moral philosophy, it was indeed Melanchthon rather than Luther who promoted astronomy and astrology both within the university curriculum and as elite intellectual pursuits of particular religious significance. Yet as the process of confessionalisation unfolded, giving the very term ‘Lutheran’ its salience, Melanchthon’s right to be considered a Lutheran theologian was called into question, and close followers, such as his son-in-law Caspar Peucer, were accused of crypto-Calvinism. Thus, a tradition of philosophical inquiry that owed so much to Melanchthon may not have appeared confessionally very Lutheran, by the end of the century.4 At least partly for this reason, therefore, some have preferred to describe it as Melanchthonian or Philippist – terms with an established use in church history in charting one faction in the theological struggles within Lutheranism in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in the German-speaking territories of the Empire and Scandinavia.5
