Cognitive Confusions: Dreams, Delusions and Illusions in Early Modern Culture. Ita Mac Carthy, Kirsti Sellevold, and Olivia Smith, eds. Cambridge: Legenda, 2016. xii + 188 pp. $99.
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 SwedenFinland 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 sixteenthand 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.