ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Confessional Encyclopaedic Cosmography: Sebastian Muenster and Johannes Rauw

• In Event: Divining Heaven and Earth

English Abstract

Sebastian Muenster's Cosmographia, first published in German in 1544, was both the original encyclopaedic cosmography and the most successful example of that genre. The work appeared in 21 German and 5 Latin editions up until 1628; it was also published in French, Italian, and Czech, and excerpted in English. Scholars of Muenster and his account of the world have often struggled to understand its relationship to the confessional struggles through which he lived. Muenster was himself a Franciscan who abandoned Catholicism before taking up a post at the Reformed University of Basle. But he avoided religious polemic, and seems to have hoped that his scholarship would meet with approval from both Catholics and Protestants. It is clear, however, that divine providence was a governing principle of his cosmography. That fact has contributed to a range of interpretations of his own faith. He has sometimes been labelled a Lutheran – or, if not exactly a Lutheran, a scholar strongly shaped by the work Philip Melanchthon, whose views on divine providence were also key to his understanding of the physical world. In this paper, I will unpick the claims of a relationship between the cosmography of Muenster and the natural philosophy of Melanchthon, both by interrogating them on their own merits and by contrasting Muenster’s Cosmographia with a genuine Lutheran example, that of Johannes Rauw, published in German in 1597 and again in 1612. Cosmography, I shall show, was a confessionally contested science, which produced different accounts of the world.

Author

• Adam Mosley, Swansea University