Meteors, Prodigies, and Signs: The Interpretation of the Unusual in Sixteenth-Century England

In sixteenth-century England, unusual events inspired religious and political interpretations. Some historians have viewed such responses as reactionary attempts to assign a spiritual gloss to fundamentally ordinary phenomena, a process that early modern thinkers rejected as they naturalized rare prodigies and brought them into a more secular and regular worldview. Such an explanation is inadequate to address the concerns of contemporaries who saw the concept of ‘natural’ itself as a problematic interpretation and who consequently sought to attribute a greater significance to extraordinary occurrences, allowing them to represent the potential for divine activity in the world.