Author: Nienke Roelants (KU Leuven)
Publisher: Brill, 2024
Focusing on the works of a select group of Lutheran astronomers in the Wittenberg sphere of influence, Earthly Adams and Pious Philosophers recognizes in their response to the sixteenth-century astronomical revolution a theological anthropological pattern. In challenging traditional cosmology and its Scholastic advocates, Georg Joachim Rheticus, Tycho Brahe, and Caspar Peucer invoked intellectual piety and a pessimist epistemology that were tailored to Luther’s understanding of man after the Fall. The fruitful ignorance that they accepted and advocated may be seen as part of a larger view of the self and the world as well as of the figure of the astronomer, the academic scholar and the university, which was of an essentially theological nature.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: On Earthly Adams and Pious Philosophers
1 The True Church at Wittenberg University
2 Luther’s Anthropology
3 Learned Devotion
4 Georg Joachim Rheticus and Fruitful Ignorance
5 Tycho Brahe’s Turn to the Book of Nature
6 Caspar Peucer’s Turn to Mosaic Philosophy
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index Nominum