ABSTRACT
During the religious uncertainty, confusion, and anxiety of the early modern period, when the lives of people became intertwined with confessional hatred, intolerance, and violence, comet portents were taken even more seriously as predictors of the outcome of the religious struggles and of the end of the world. Comet portents were perfectly designed for a worldview steeped in conflict, uncertainty, desperation, and an intense desire to know the future and thus the approaching outcome of all human suffering. God is in the habit of not giving men betterment of life, but on the contrary of punishing their sins, because He is an eternal God and wants to pay men with fair and well-deserved wages for their evil. The early modern view of comets gradually changed from the seventeenth century onward, resulting in the current view of comets as natural parts of the physical universe, having no meaning beyond their physical characteristics and no role in terrestrial drama as portents.
