Wonderful secrets of nature. Natural knowledge and religious piety in Reformation Germany.

Abstract

Sixteenth-century Germany witnessed a tremendous flourishing of vernacular literature. An unprecedented number and variety of texts were produced for new groups of readers. This essay analyzes one underexplored genre of this vernacular literature: texts on the natural world. Numerous books on animals, plants, minerals, and natural marvels rolled off the German presses in this period, indicating a widespread curiosity about the natural world. These texts give valuable insight into the views of nature available to a broad lay audience, literate in German but not necessarily in Latin. They reveal a pervasive sense of nature as divinely created and a deep conviction that contemplation of the natural world would lead to greater piety. The divine and the mundane were thoroughly intertwined in vernacular natural histories. While other historians of science have seen the sixteenth century as a period of increasingly secular ways of thinking about nature, I argue for the persistence, and even the intensification, of profoundly religious attitudes toward the natural world.