The Apocalypse in Reformation Nuremberg. Jews and Turks in Andreas Osiander’s World

Abstract

Andreas Osiander is likely less familiar to most readers than many of the first-generation reformers with whom he studied, corresponded, debated and sometimes parted ways. Readers can therefore be grateful to Andrew Thomas, whose study of this sixteenth-century Lutheran theologian—a key figure in the introduction and institutionalization of reformed dogma and practice in Nuremberg and Ducal Prussia—serves as a welcome opportunity to get to know Osiander better. This is not an intellectual biography, despite its grounding largely in the edited volumes of the Osiander Gesamtausgabe. Instead Thomas, whose first book offered a comparative history of the Wittelsbach courts’ responses to the Reformation, considers Osiander as a lens onto Christian attitudes towards non-Christians and the apocalyptic horizon within which so much of the intellectual history of the sixteenth century unfolded. Used in this way, Osiander’s sermons and correspondence shed light on developments in Protestant theology, on the impacts of the Turkish wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on Christian thought, and on the place of Jews and Muslims in the imagination of early modern Christian Europeans.