Lutheran University of Strasbourg

The Lutheran University of Strasbourg is one of two universities in Strasbourg represented in a satirical episode about scholarly disputation. Its Protestant doctors take part in an extended argument over the fate of Martin Luther, a controversy the narration presents as so consuming that it absorbs the universities’ learning—until a stranger’s nose becomes a more powerful public distraction.

Identity and Setting

The narrative identifies the institution as the Lutheran university of Strasbourg and distinguishes it from the city’s Popish university. It says the Lutheran institution was founded in 1538 by Jacobus Surmis, a counsellor of the senate. The university’s Protestant doctors are its representatives in the dispute over Luther.

The Dispute over Luther

The two universities devote their learning to determining whether Martin Luther was damned. The Popish doctors construct an argument from the arrangement of the planets on 22 October 1483, the date they assign to Luther’s birth, claiming that this configuration made his damnation unavoidable. The Lutheran doctors contest that conclusion through a nautical metaphor: they argue that Luther had not sailed directly before the wind, as their opponents maintained. Since, in their formulation, no one could sail directly into the wind, they propose to determine how far off course he had been—whether he had rounded a cape or struck a lee shore.

The account treats these technical distinctions as evidence of the dispute’s elaborate ingenuity, while also making their practical significance seem remote. The doctors are ready to continue the inquiry, which the narrator notes would edify those who understood this kind of navigation. Their argument is not resolved in the passage; rather, its course is interrupted by events outside the university.

Distraction and Narrative Significance

The stranger’s nose draws attention away from the universities’ proceedings. The narrator says the doctors would have continued despite its size, but that the wider public’s fascination with it redirected attention from their debate. In the parallel account of the Popish university, even another matter that might have occupied the scholars is eclipsed by the nose. The episode thus places institutional learning beside collective curiosity: an intricate theological controversy can be displaced not by a stronger argument, but by a striking spectacle that captures the public imagination.

The university’s appearance also contributes to the book’s recurring interplay of names, noses, and digressive storytelling. The narrator connects the episode to Walter Shandy’s interest in hypotheses about names and noses, presenting the tale as material that particularly gratifies both. The Lutheran doctors are therefore not developed as individual characters or given a separate institutional history; they serve as participants in a comic scholarly contest whose attention is finally commandeered by the stranger’s nose.