Pulcherrimus ordo naturae in Crisis or How Bohemian Latin Poets Coped with Changes in Wittenberg Cosmology after 1574

Abstract

This article examines how Bohemian scholars and students coped with the reform of teaching at the University of Wittenberg after 1574. At that time, the physica integra, i.e. the doctrine of Philipp Melanchthon and his collaborators about the created physical world and its complex causalities, in which the observation of crisis phenomena in society and nature as manifestations of special providence played a key role, was no longer taught at the university. The view of the physical world had permeated the teaching of various subjects there at least from the 1530s and reached a large number of students from different regions, including a whole generation of students from Bohemia. The article focuses on the two decades after the introduction of the changes in the Wittenberg curriculum, when Latin poems on astronomical and natural phenomena, as well as on the imminent end of the world, were still popular in Bohemia. It shows how the older authors gradually transformed the original Wittenberg approach while the younger generation had already begun to write more radical poems and gradually abandoned the Wittenberg cosmology and style. Even in their works, however, one can see attempts to strategically incorporate elements of the previous Wittenberg understanding for example through the poems of invited co-authors. One of the reasons for this may have been that the poems were mostly published as broadsides and used as gifts to raise as much support as possible from various patrons. The diversity of opinion, even on cosmology, was therefore an advantage in the intellectual life of the time.