Medicine, Natural Philosophy and Religion in Post-Reformation Scandinavia is the latest entry in the Routledge series The History of Medicine in Context. It also represents the most recent volume coedited by the indefatigable team of Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham, whose other works in this series have addressed related subjects, including poor relief and welfare. One of the most attractive features of their collaboration is its range, which includes often neglected time periods and areas, such as early modern Sweden-Finland and Denmark-Norway.

For most historians, Scandinavia still hovers on the periphery of their consciousness. If most have some inkling of Sweden’s and Denmark’s roles in the Thirty Years’ War, they tend to know far less about their internal history or whether those histories followed a familiar European pattern or not. These articles firmly center Scandinavia within the mainstream of the larger forces reworking medicine, natural philosophy, and religion in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe that often (if not exclusively) emanated from Germany, specifically from Wittenberg. The quiet, retiring Melanchthon looms very large here, far outweighing in terms of effect the more boisterous and colorful Luther.

Ole Peter Grell’s short but excellent introduction explains the relationship of the three topical terms in the title. Protestantism was key and provided “a new, more philosophical and theological role for anatomical knowledge. For the Lutheran Protestants, the human body was the temple of God, and seeing was believing” (18). Thus, what Signe Nipper Nielsen writes about the natural philosopher Thomas Bartholin proves equally valid for the other figures in this volume: “Bartholin’s works spanned medicine and anatomy, natural history, antiquarian studies, philology, theology and medicina sacra.” These people belonged to a “vast scholarly cross-European network of erudite men” that reached from Padua to Uppsala, Copenhagen to Cracow (117).

The common interpretive thread follows the network of learned men who were engaged in the “collective project of spreading and exchanging natural knowledge across borders and confessions” (116). Much influence radiated outward from Wittenberg, of course, but it would be mistaken to believe that Scandinavian thinkers merely replicated German or Italian models in miniature. Danes, Swedes, and Finns not only drew on a larger European Reformation heritage; Holger Rosenkrantz the Learned, Sigfrid Aronus Forsius, Johannis Prytz, and Johannes Bureus were sophisticated thinkers who made original contributions to a pan-European intellectual movement that melded theology and natural philosophy. Rosenkrantz (the first Danish nobleman to receive a university education) was not only a “hugely influential figure in early-seventeenth-century Denmark,” but, as Jens Glebe-Møller points out, a scholar enjoying a major reputation throughout Europe. Thus, if the stream of influence from Germany to Scandinavia was broader and flowed faster than that from Scandinavia to the rest of Europe, the latter by no means merely trickled. These were not marginal men.

The essays also reveal how “the study of nature [was] … a form of worship” (208). The introduction notes that two rulers (significantly “usurpers”), Gustav-Vasa in Sweden-Finland and Frederik I in Denmark-Norway, regarded the new evangelical ideas as “useful for their aim of establishing national churches under royal control” (1), thus lending royal support (at least implicitly) to the driving force that religion (Protestantism/Lutheranism) became in fusing medicine, natural philosophy, and religion intellectually. Many sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century thinkers, in Scandinavia as elsewhere, shared the idea that the “book of nature” was “much more than a mere metaphor.” In nature one could find “inscribed [God’s] … own perfect wisdom” (172). Melanchthon insisted that knowledge of anatomy was the best way for Protestants, who inhabited an imperfect sublunary world, to perceive God.

These two strongly articulated themes bind the collection together, but the individual authors also highlight differences. Each contribution provides considerable detail (sometimes a bit too much detail) but rarely strays far from the main interpretations advanced here. The result is a richly textured view of science, medicine, and religion in post-Reformation Scandinavia. Scholars who know a good deal about the relationship between early modern science and religion and who believe that relationship is complementary and not antagonistic, will not be surprised by the general interpretations presented here. Nonetheless, these twelve articles do not just add their moiety to our store of knowledge; rather, they enhance, nuance, and expand it while demonstrating how tightly interwoven, but also richly variegated, the intellectual world of post-Reformation Europe was.