Earthly Adams and Pious Philosophers

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.