Popish University of Strasbourg

The Popish University of Strasbourg is the Catholic counterpart to the Lutheran university in a satirical episode about attempts to determine Martin Luther’s fate through astrology. Founded by Leopold, Archduke of Austria, it joins its rival in an elaborate inquiry whose claims collapse under a basic dispute about Luther’s birth date. The university’s work is then abandoned when a stranger’s nose captures the public imagination, displacing both theological controversy and other institutional business.

Identity and Setting

The Popish University of Strasbourg is identified as one of two universities in Strasbourg, alongside a Lutheran institution founded in 1538 by Jacobus Surmis, a counsellor of the senate. The narrator says the Catholic university was founded by Leopold, Archduke of Austria. The institutions are presented not as detached centers of learning but as active participants in a public contest over Luther’s religious standing and ultimate fate.

The university’s inquiry takes place amid other scholarly and ecclesiastical concerns. The narrator notes that the universities were devoting their learning to the question of Luther’s damnation, while the abbess of Quedlingberg and four dignitaries were occupied with a separate case. That juxtaposition places the university’s grand claims within a broader world of disputation, official business, and comic distraction.

The Astrological Case Against Luther

The Popish doctors set out to demonstrate that Luther must have been damned because of the planets’ positions on 22 October 1483. Their account specifies the moon in the twelfth house, Jupiter, Mars, and Venus in the third, and the Sun, Saturn, and Mercury gathered in the fourth. From this configuration, they infer that Luther himself must be damned and that his doctrines must therefore be damned as well.

They reinforce the conclusion by inspecting a horoscope that places five planets in conjunction with Scorpio in the ninth house, which they associate with religion. The astrological reading is made to predict not only Luther’s religious character but also his death and the destination of his soul. The narrator reports that Walter Shandy would shake his head while reading this material, marking the passage as an object of his scrutiny as well as part of the university’s case.

Rivalry and the Birth-Date Dispute

The Lutheran doctors challenge the Catholic account by disputing the premise on which its horoscope depends. A register from Islaben, in the county of Mansfelt, gives Luther’s birth as 10 November 1484, rather than 22 October 1483. The difference is decisive: if the horoscope belongs to someone born on the earlier date, the Luther condemned by the Catholic doctors cannot be the person to whom their astrological prediction applies.

The two universities then extend their dispute through the language of navigation. The Protestant doctors argue that Luther did not sail before the wind as their opponents claimed; since sailing directly against it was impossible, they are preparing to determine how far off course he might have been, and whether he doubled a cape or reached a lee shore. The metaphor turns the alleged fate of Luther’s soul into a technical puzzle, sustaining the quarrel even as its practical and religious stakes become entangled with comic wordplay.

Distraction and Abandoned Controversy

The stranger’s nose draws attention away from the universities’ investigation. The narrator says the doctors would have continued their discussion of Luther’s spiritual navigation had the size of the stranger’s nose not diverted the world’s attention. Once public curiosity shifts, the scholars’ pursuit is no longer what people attend to, and the passage treats their obligation to follow that attention as part of the joke.

The abbess’s case is also displaced: the stranger’s nose occupies the imagination of those involved, leaving her business cold. The printers are ordered to distribute their type, and the controversies are dropped. Thus the university’s sustained astrological argument ends not in resolution but in interruption, its elaborate claims yielding to a new object of collective interest.

Narrative Significance

The Popish University of Strasbourg embodies the book’s satire of systems that claim to convert uncertain evidence into certainty. Its doctors reason from planetary conjunctions to damnation, but their elaborate conclusion depends on a birth date the rival university contests. The quarrel’s form—assertion, rebuttal, and ever finer technical distinctions—makes learning appear at once earnest and vulnerable to its own assumptions.

The episode’s abrupt change of subject gives that vulnerability a material, comic consequence. A nose, rather than a counterargument, ends the universities’ work: attention moves, printers dismantle the controversy’s immediate setting, and the scholars follow. The university’s episode therefore links intellectual authority to the unstable conditions of public interest, while the narrative itself reproduces that instability by turning from theological debate to spectacle.