Abstract

Building on methodological considerations in cultural history and historical anthropology, the following contribution proceeds from the concept of ‚nature’ rather than from ‚natural science’, with the former understood here as the object of culturally determined projections, values and practices. This ‚constructive’, practice-oriented concept of nature exposes perceptions of and attitudes towards nature that, owing to the usual reduction of nature to natural science, would otherwise have remained hidden, but which may well be essential to its constitution. To a certain extent, the term ‚nature’ continues the terminological extension from ‚natural science’ to ‚natural philosophy’, but as a heuristic device it more strongly implies the significance of culturally mediated practices and dynamics. The essay raises the following questions: Which religious conceptions entered into which attitudes towards nature and which religious expectations and interpretive matrices were the motivating forces behind which studies of nature?The figures within seventeenth-century Lutheranism who shaped and promoted nature-oriented attitudes and practices were not the ‚orthodox’ scholars more strongly tied to academic and controversialist theology, but rather reform-oriented theologians critical of the church. In the context of the inner differentiation and pluralization of seventeenth-century Lutheranism, these reform-oriented groups not only inspired innovate theological projects but also assumed a leading role, along with liked-minded Christian laypersons, in interpreting and studying ‚nature’