Taming the Prophets: Astrology, Orthodoxy and the Word of God in Early Modern Sweden (review)

This tidy, modest, and clearly written book contextualizes a Swedish attempt of 1619 to de-legitimize astrological prognostications. Kjellgren recounts the persecution of Sigfrid Forsius, a moderately successful mathematician and almanac producer from Finland, by a commission (technically, an "inquisition") that included a "scientific" expert—a former professor of astronomy and almanac maker, who had become a bishop in Sweden's anxiously confessional and royally controlled Lutheran establishment.

Forsius, the author of no fewer than twenty-seven publications between 1602 and 1623—nearly all of them in Swedish (listed on 306- 308)—is the most interesting character in this story. He was Sweden's first author specializing in almanacs—which were rare until 1600— eventually becoming sufficiently well-known for his "name [to be] used as a sales pitch even after his death" (278). But this apparently autodidact Finnish-born cleric was an incorrigible Bohemian, described as an "annoying and restless man" or as "restless, unruly, and irresponsible" (209, 215). His censors were not exaggerating. Forsius' escapades include service in Estonia as an army chaplain in both 1599 and 1616; a border-mapping expedition to Lapland in 1601/02; an arrest in Finland in 1606; and serious quarrels with, and long separations from, his wife. A guest was once killed after a drunken brawl in their house.

Laurentius Paulius Gothus, the other main figure, published eleven works between 1591 and 1636 (the first two being almanacs), while obtaining high rewards after steering successfully through the dangerous waters of a state church in flux (309-310). En route, he appeared to change positions about the utility of astrological prognostications between his early almanacs and his role in de-legitimizing Forsius in 1619. However, Kjellgren argues, the censure of Forsus had much less to do with the permissibility of astrological forecasts in almanacs than with simply silencing an embarrassing clerical "black-sheep": "There are no new arguments raised against astrology, only a new inclination to define the efforts of astrologers as illicit" (257). As late as 1636, notes Kjellgren, Paulius still offered a limited defense of astrology's usefulness in medicine and agriculture (286).

This book contains some interesting sections about how Swedish Lutheran astronomy and astrology encountered the Gregorian calendar reform and a comparison between Forsius' and Paulinus' commentaries on a comet in 1607 (122-127,164-172), but it offers no genuinely interdisciplinary approach and rarely ventures beyond the northernmost margins of a deeply confessionalized Europe. Forsius notwithstanding, Sweden in 1619 seems to have been a kinder and gentler place than England, where a 1603 regulation threatened that authors of "prophecies exceeding the limits of allowable astrology shall be punished severely in their persons" (25). Sweden also seems to have been a universe apart from post-Tridentine Italy, where Galileo was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1600 for making excessive claims about the predictions of his horoscopes and twenty years later circulated a letter to the dowager grand duchess of Tuscany arguing that mathematically demonstrated astronomical truths took precedence over Scriptural texts.