The decades straddling 1600 constitute a transformative period for Scandinavia, when the religious and social changes of the Reformation were harnessed to the formation of early modern nation states. Successfully reformed by the 1580s, the Lutheran state churches of Denmark and Sweden reacted to the confessional strife of their German-speaking neighbors to the south by consolidating church discipline and dogma around the Augsburg Confession, with strong influences of the more conservative interpretation represented in the Formula of Concord (1577). This new orthodoxy was hastened by the Counter-Reformation, which threatened to undermine the Protestant North through written propaganda, training of Scandinavians in exile, and secret Catholic missions. Sweden was particularly at risk toward the end of the sixteenth century, because its hereditary king, Sigismund, was also heir to the crown of Catholic Poland and ruled Sweden from abroad. Caught between feudal obligations to a Catholic monarch, the need to maintain ecclesiastical authority within Sweden, and pressures from the Swedish aristocracy to defend the Protestant faith, the Swedish church cautiously backed Sigismund’s Protestant uncle, Duke Charles, who seized the throne and sought to limit the authority of the church to enhance his own. The turmoil leading up to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War increased the need for both crown and clergy to unify the nation, bringing a measure of cooperation. Historians of this period have sought to understand both the macroscopic contours of this social and cultural transition and the microscopic events that shaped the implementation of these larger changes at the local level. Martin Kjellgren’s study contributes to this inquiry by focusing on an often marginal subject that has found a place in the social and intellectual history of early modern Europe, astrology, and prophecy. He places his subject within the specific context of Sweden in the decades prior to Gustavus Adolphus’s entry into the Thirty Years War.

Kjellgren’s point of departure is the observation that astrological tracts published in the 1590s by educated Swedish churchmen embraced forecasts and prophesy that were grounded in German precedents and academic natural philosophy — part of an established tradition of millenarian speculation within Protestant exegesis and propaganda — but that these same authors aggressively attacked similar discourses by their peers in the second decade of the 1600s, in some cases changing their own approaches to astrology. A culminating event in this trajectory from exegetical freedom to ecclesiastical censure of astrology was the 1619 inquisition that targeted the Finnish priest and natural philosopher Sigrid Aronius Forsius for transgressing the legitimate boundaries of prophecy through publication of predictions based on astrology. Forsius projected his forecasts as based on accepted astrological principles and with reference to Aristotelian and neoteric natural philosophies of the sort that churchmen had used in the previous decades, but these were now considered by his superiors as an abuse of church discipline and a threat to the promulgation of the faith to the laity. Kjellgren places this seeming rejection of astrology in the specific negotiations of power within the Swedish church in this period of transition, namely the acquiescence of the crown to the Church’s assertion of its authority and the pervasive need for ecclesiastics to circle the parish wagons in defense of the Protestant North against the Counter-Reformation Empire. That is, he explains the change in Swedish academic attitude toward astrology as vested in local changes in social networks and political power alliances rather than indicating a broader rejection of the occult principles underpinning astrology, as has been suggested in accounts of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. The increasing promulgation of almanacs in vernacular languages extended the reach of such prophecies and predictions to the lower priesthood and laity, precipitating a reaction by leading church authorities to instruct the preaching clergy and police the content of the almanacs. Ultimately, Swedish ecclesiastics found astrological prophecies of the sort promulgated by Forsius to be inimical to the stability of the state, not because of their philosophical underpinnings or the general validity of prophesy, but because they offered prophecies that were not approved and controlled by the state church. Such unauthorized prophesies were now grouped with the books and pamphlets associated with the Rosicrucians, Weigelians, and other promoters of uncontrolled religious ideas and concomitant social unrest. Kjellgren’s careful, erudite, and thoroughly documented analysis fits comfortably within recent historiography of the continuing Reformation of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and reactions to it by the Protestant orthodoxies then in power in the churches of Northern Europe.