Medicine, Natural Philosophy and Religion in Post-Reformation Scandinavia

Ole Grell, Andrew Cunningham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472439581
• eBook ISBN: 9781317098195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The close relationship between religion, medicine and natural philosophy in the post-Reformation period has been documented and explored in a body of research since the 1990s; however, the direct and continued impact of Melanchthonian natural philosophy within the individual Lutheran principalities of northern Europe in general and Scandinavia in particular still has to be fully investigated and understood. This volume provides insight into how and why medicine and natural philosophy in a 'liberal' and Melanchthonian form could continue to blossom in Scandinavia despite a growing Lutheran uniformity promoted by the State. Inspired by research emanating from the Cambridge Unit for the History of Medicine, here a number of young scholars such as Adam Mosley, Morten Fink-Jensen, Signe Nipper Nielsen and Martin Kjellgren are joined with more established scholars such as Andrew Cunningham, Jens Glebe-Møller, Terhi Kiiskinen and Ole Peter Grell to create a volume which deals with not only the major issues but also the leading personalities of the period.

1 Introduction

Ole Peter Grell

Evangelical ideas had reached Scandinavia by 1520 and quickly gained a following. Both the kingdoms of Denmark-Norway and Sweden-Finland experienced Lutheran Reformations during the sixteenth century and had become prominent Lutheran kingdoms by the start of the Thirty Years’ War.¹ However, the process by which they reached a reformation proved very different.

The Union of the Scandinavian Kingdoms had collapsed following the failed attempt of King Christian II to suppress the movement for greater Swedish independence when he massacred more than eighty members of the Swedish lay and ecclesiastical aristocracy in Stockholm in 1520. By 1521, Sweden had been re-established as an independent kingdom under the rule of Gustav Vasa. Two years later, King Christian II was deposed by the Danish Council (Rigsrådet), which immediately elected his uncle Duke Frederik of Schleswig and Holstein as king. By the summer of 1523, two usurpers, Gustav Vasa and Frederik I had in other words succeeded to the thrones of Sweden-Finland and Denmark-Norway respectively. Both were positively inclined towards the new evangelical ideas and saw them as useful for their aim of establishing national churches under royal control. Where Gustav Vasa was guided primarily by political and economic considerations, Frederik I and later his son Christian III were to a considerable extent influenced by their evangelical, Lutheran faith.²

The constant threat presented by the deposed and exiled king, Christian II, and his Habsburg family to the new rulers of Sweden and Denmark endured until the 1530s. It resulted in some cautious, political co-operation between Gustav Vasa and Frederik I, even if Gustav Vasa doubted the sincerity of Frederik I and especially that of his son Christian III, whom he was convinced intended to re-create the Scandinavian Union under Danish control. This was not just paranoia from Gustav Vasa; his position remained at risk well into the 1540s, confronted as he was with a number of internal revolts and a lack of external recognition of the legitimacy of his rule. Here Frederik I and Christian III were in a far better position belonging to the royal family having been next in line of succession to Christian II.

Both Gustav Vasa and Frederik I found themselves seriously in debt by the time they succeeded to the throne. Once again, Gustav’s situation was far worse than that of Frederik I because of the cost of the lengthy military campaign needed to defeat the supporters of Christian II in Sweden; however, the largely unopposed military advance of Frederik I through Jutland to Copenhagen did come at a price too. In both countries, this caused serious economic and fiscal problems for years to come. The kingdoms’ finances were further undermined by the many rebellions in Sweden by the Catholic peasantry and by the civil war in Denmark between 1534 and 1536 leading up to the reformation of the kingdom.³

Popular support for the new evangelical ideas was undoubtedly much stronger in Denmark than Sweden during the first decades of the sixteenth century. This was most likely due to the fact that Denmark was by far the most urbanised country in Scandinavia. More than 10 per cent of the population lived in cities and towns, such as Copenhagen, Malmø, Elsinore, Odense, Aalborg, and Aarhus, which ranged in size from between 8,000 to 2,000 inhabitants. Less than 5 per cent of the population of Sweden lived in towns, and only Stockholm, which had a population estimated somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 inhabitants, could lay any claim to urban status. Most other Swedish towns were little more than large villages, while both Norway and Finland were even more rural in character.⁴

Consequently, Denmark experienced a full Reformation decades before the other Scandinavian countries receiving its Lutheran Church order in 1537. It had been written under the supervision of Luther’s trusted colleague and friend, Johannes Bugenhagen, who had been dispatched to Copenhagen. The new Lutheran church in Denmark closely followed the Wittenberg model, and for the next couple of generations, most of the leading Danish theologians, from Peter Palladius, via Niels Hemmingsen, to Hans Poulsen Resen, attended the University of Wittenberg.

The Swedish Reformation proved considerably more tortuous and much slower than the Danish. Sweden did not receive a Protestant Church Order until 1571 and then only in a confessionally vague form. It was not until the Uppsala Assembly of 1593 that Sweden finally opted for Lutheranism. For most of the sixteenth century, Sweden remained the religiously most heterodox of the Scandinavian kingdoms. It was torn between Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Catholicism, throughout the second half of the sixteenth century. In many ways, this was a bequest from the reign of Gustav Vasa (1521–1560). The King had remained firmly in control of all ecclesiastical matters in his realm during the last twenty years of his long reign, but had avoided making any final decisions about ecclesiastical organisation and confessional matters. The fact that he chose Calvinist tutors for his sons the later Kings Erik XIV and Karl IX is also indicative that confessional orthodoxy was far from the concerns of Gustav Vasa. The result was that the Swedish Church continued to be led by the Archbishop of Uppsala separated legally and practically from the state. This guaranteed that the Swedish church could pursue its own church policy, given the right political and ecclesiastical circumstances, as it did during the reign of Gustav Vasa’s three sons Erik XIV, Johan III, and Charles IX.

The lack of institutionalisation of the Reformation in Sweden, however, exposed the Swedish Church to the changing religious views of the reigning monarchs. Thus, during the first years of the reign of Erik XIV, Calvinism was gaining ground until the King and his Huguenot advisors were confronted by the Archbishop and the predominantly Lutheran hierarchy of the Swedish Church. In the 1570s, Erik’s successor Johan III sought to steer the Swedish Church closer to Catholicism, through amendments to the Church Order of 1571, the so-called Nova Ordinantia and the introduction of a new liturgy. Johan III probably never intended a return to the Catholic Church, but he encouraged the attempts by Jesuits to introduce the Counter-Reformation in Sweden. The Norwegian Jesuit, Laurentius Nicolai, who arrived in Stockholm in 1576 managed to ingratiate himself with the King to the extent that he was allowed to open a theological college in the former Franciscan monastery in the city. This was a shrewd move by Laurentius Nicolai, having quickly identified one of the major weaknesses of the Swedish Reformation: the dearth of Protestant secondary and tertiary education in the country.

The University of Uppsala had been closed since 1516 and despite attempts by both Erik XIV and Johan III to reinvigorate it, little had been achieved and there was nowhere in Sweden where the clergy could be properly educated. For two years, Laurentius Nicolai’s Jesuit ‘college’ managed to fill this void with considerable success until riots in Stockholm resulting from his public divulgence of being a Jesuit forced Johan III to close it down. It was only in the wake of the Uppsala Assembly in 1593, which finally confirmed the Swedish Church as Lutheran, that it was decided to re-open the University of Uppsala. The official opening of the university took place in 1595 under the sponsorship of Duke Charles, the later Charles IX.

The Jesuit attempt to infiltrate Sweden, however, served to undermine the reign of Johan’s son, the Catholic King Sigismund of Poland, who was eventually deposed in 1599 after only six years on the throne. The Protestant opposition to the pro-Catholic policies of Johan and Sigismund was openly encouraged and supported by Duke Charles. Several prominent bishops of the Swedish Church sought sanctuary in Charles’ duchy only to return after Sigismund’s defeat in the civil war in 1599. Charles upon taking over from Sigismund found that many of the Lutheran bishops he had offered protection during the reigns of Johan and Sigismund now turned against him. They accused him of crypto-Calvinism and for seeking to bring the Church under royal control.⁵

The fact that Charles IX was interested in plans for Protestant unification confronted as it was with resurgent Counter-Reformation Catholicism may well have helped bring about these accusations. Thus in 1608, the king organised a religious disputation between the Scottish, Calvinist minister, John Forbes, who had arrived in Stockholm and his Lutheran Archbishop, Olaus Martini. It would appear that Charles IX was still contemplating such a scheme two years later when John Forbes made a second visit to Sweden. His son, Gustavus Adolphus, retained this interest in unification of the different Protestant denominations. King Gustavus Adolphus and his closest advisors Axel Oxenstierna and Johan Skytte actively promoted John Dury’s well-publicised plans for a merger of the Protestant churches and later invited his friend and associate Amos Comenius to Sweden. This was done despite forceful opposition from the Lutheran leadership of the Swedish church.⁶

As opposed to Sweden the Reformation in Denmark proved remarkably stable. The Church Order of 1537 offered a solid foundation for a supple anti-doctrinal Lutheranism, which, at least from the government’s perspective, remained unchanged throughout this period, even if the dominant theology of the church gradually moved in a more ‘liberal’ Melanchthonian direction, as can be seen from the example of Niels Hemmingsen.⁷ The Danish kings, Christian III and his son Fredrik II, actively discouraged religious debate, and not until the second decade of the seventeenth century, in the reign of Christian IV, as a reaction to Counter-Reformation Catholicism on the one hand, and Calvinism on the other, did the Danish church witness a struggle over doctrine. Even so the outcome was never in doubt. Bishop Hans Poulsen Resen’s drive for Lutheran uniformity was an integral part of the government’s drive towards more absolutist policies. Resen’s drive towards Lutheran uniformity bore greater similarities with the church policy pursued in England by Archbishop William Laud in the 1630s than the push towards a confessional Lutheran orthodoxy which engulfed a number of German territorial states in the same period.⁸

As opposed to Sweden, Denmark also benefitted from an extended period of internal peace and stability, which made it possible for the government gradually to put a new Lutheran ecclesiastical administration in place and to build up a network of Lutheran Latin schools.⁹ The University of Copenhagen was only closed for six years, between 1531 and 1537, because of the disturbances linked to the Reformation, and when reopened, was re-modelled on the University of Wittenberg. This focus on improving the educational and institutional framework for the new Lutheran church was temporarily halted by the Seven Years’ War with Sweden from 1563 to 1570. The Peace of Stettin in 1570, however, saw renewed efforts put in place to improve both secondary and tertiary education in the country, while the much improved economic conditions made it possible to augment the salaries of professors, ministers, and teachers considerably while making grants available for talented students.¹⁰

By the end of the sixteenth century, the University of Copenhagen was able to employ a full complement of highly qualified professors in most subjects. Some of these men such as the professor of theology, Niels Hemmingsen, and the professor of medicine, Caspar Bartholin the Elder, achieved international fame through their publications.¹¹ By then the Royal Court regularly employed talented Paracelsian physicians such as Peter Severinus the Dane, and later the iatrochemist/physician Peter Payngk, who had spent time at the court of Emperor Rudolph II in Prague. In 1609, Christian IV built a distillation house in the garden of Rosenborg Castle so Peter Payngk could produce the medical remedies he required.¹²

At the same time, Tycho Brahe’s ‘research centre’ on the Island of Hven was established in 1576. Tycho’s personally designed the new research facility, Uraniborg, which was ready five years later with a wealth of astronomical instruments and an alchemical workshop. Brahe attracted a considerable number of talented scholars and a constant stream of visitors until he eventually left Hven in 1597. Many of Tycho Brahe’s assistants went on to impressive careers at the University of Copenhagen such as Cort Aslakssøn who became professor of theology, Christian Hansen Riper who became professor of Greek, Gellius Sascerides who became professor of medicine, and Christian Sørensen Longomontanus who became professor of mathematics and astronomy, to mention some of the most prominent.¹³

The nobleman, Holger Rosenkrantz the Learned, who had visited Tycho Brahe on Hven in 1592 and again at Wandsburg in 1598, became a friend and sponsor of Brahe. After his marriage to Tycho Brahe’s niece, Holger Rosenkrantz settled at Rosenholm Castle where he established an informal school or academy for talented youngsters. Rosenkrantz built the library at Rosenholm into one of the most impressive in northern Europe, became part of the international republic of letters, and collected manuscripts, antiquities, and scientific instruments.¹⁴

Both Uraniborg from 1576 to 1597 and Rosenholm Castle from 1598 to 1615 offered important additional scholarly centres to the University of Copenhagen, even if they catered for very different clienteles. Uraniborg attracted young and ambitious scholars who engaged in observations and experiments from astronomy to alchemy, whereas the academy on Rosenholm Castle was aimed at teenagers.

In 1586, King Frederik II had turned the former monastery of Sorø into a secondary boarding school primarily for sons of the nobility. The school was converted into an academy for the nobility in 1623 by his son Christian IV. The King wanted the academy to supplant the need for young noblemen to go abroad for their education. A number of professors were appointed and gradually the academy became a mini university, and in 1629, it was decided that graduates from Sorø Academy could become ministers of the church. By 1635, the academy recruited a fair number of students from outside the nobility, and eight years later, it was given equal status to the University of Copenhagen.¹⁵ To an even greater extent than Uraniborg and Rosenholm Castle the Academy in Sorø served as an additional centre for tertiary education and research to the University of Copenhagen.

The first two chapters of this volume focus on Wittenberg and its university which proved so significant for secondary and tertiary educational initiatives in Scandinavia in the Reformation period. Andrew Cunningham starts us off with a chapter about how and why Philip Melancht...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Philip Melanchthon and his significance for natural philosophy
• 3 Daniel Sennert and the chymico-atomical reform of medicine
• 4 The changing face of Lutheranism in post-Reformation Denmark
• 5 After Tycho: Philippist astronomy and cosmology in the work of Brahe’s Scandinavian assistants
• 6 The Book of Nature and the Word of God: Lutheran natural philosophy and medicine in early-seventeenth-century Denmark and Norway
• 7 Holger Rosenkrantz, ‘the Learned’ (1574–1642)
• 8 The significance of monstrous births in Thomas Bartholin’s natural philosophy
• 9 Three seventeenth-century manuals on how and where to study medicine
• 10 The natural philosophy of Sigfrid Aronus Forsius: between the created world and God
• 11 Johannes Bureus and the prisca astronomia: a Lutheran antiquary engages with the new science
• 12 By natural means: magic and medicine in Ericus Johannis Prytz’s Magia incantatrix (1632)
• Index