Celestial Wonders in Reformation Germany by Ken Kurihara (review)

Celestial Wonders in Reformation Germany is a fascinating study of how the superstition surrounding, and fear of, celestial phenomena were often used by the clergy in early modern Germany to publicly validate their religious and political positions. In sixteenth-century Germany, celestial Wunderzeichen (wonder-signs) included such wondrous astrological phenomena as comets, novae, and eclipses, as well as meteorological effects such as the halo phenomena where multiple suns or moons could be seen. Other sights included fire-signs where witnesses claimed that the sky had turned blood red, or that they saw armies, rods, crosses, animals, and various other objects in the sky. According to Ken Kurihara, ‘we are not sure what people saw in the sky in reality, but we can safely state that these phenomena are collective illusions that reflect their inner concerns’ (p. 19). The most commonly recorded celestial phenomena were comets, with at least fourteen recorded in the sixteenth century.

It was a century of extreme climatic change and a mini ice age, and in the second half of the sixteenth century the social and political conditions of Germany gave the people ample reason to fear that various catastrophes would soon befall Germany. The Wunderzeichen discourses reflect these fears and the people’s need to know what they could expect for their future: there were various contemporary interpretations of these strange celestial phenomena but all could be summarised as ‘repent or face disaster’.

People in Lutheran Germany in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries showed a great deal of interest in these phenomena and the sheer number of publications concerning strange celestial signs attests to their enormous popularity. Types of publication included broadsheets, news pamphlets, wonder books, astrological tracts, sermons, devotional books, scientific works, and personal letters. Fear of God’s wrath and the imminence of the Last Judgement was a dominant theme through most of the Wunderzeichen literature and Kurihara claims that the Lutheran eschatology is the key to understanding the relationship between the clergy and Wunderzeichen discourses. Exploiting the popular interest, some Lutheran clergy incorporated news of these celestial phenomena into their sermons and other writings as they strengthened Lutheran eschatological convictions that the day of the Last Judgement was at hand and that the final countdown to the end of time had started with Luther’s Reformation. These types of celestial phenomena had been explicitly mentioned in the Bible and with the clergy actively incorporating shocking reports of Wunderzeichen stories and imagery into these sermons the necessity of repentance was reinforced.

Kurihara demonstrates that almost all of the pre-eminent theologians of the sixteenth century, including Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon, participated in Wunderzeichen discourses. Although Luther did not put much trust in astrology he did occasionally express interest in celestial wonders and he interpreted the expression ‘signs in the sun and moon’ as eclipses that were tokens of God’s wrath and predicted sure disaster for the future. Melanchthon, the German Preceptor, was particularly interested in Wunderzeichen and he promoted astronomy and astrology in the university education system. It was common for the clergy to use Wunderzeichen as anti-papist propaganda. Some, such as theologian Christoph Irenaeus, combined the two literary forms of religious polemic and wonder books, and created an original genre: he used the image of water in the floods to attack his theological opponents as being false teachers who invited God’s watery punishment. In his Wunderzeichen writings he showed that celestial wonders, religious and confessional conflict, and apocalypticism were closely interconnected with the cosmology of late sixteenth-century Lutheranism. Jacob Andreae denounced astrology as ‘spiritual fornication’ and ‘idolatry’ that invoked God’s wrath, but still claimed that the great comet of 1556 was a call for people to repent, that it was a noted sign of grace for those who did repent, and it was a sign of wrath for the unbelievers.

Kurihara creates a narrative that...