Climbing Jacob's Ladder: Crisis, chiliasm, and transcendence in the thought of Paul Nagel (1624), a Lutheran dissident during the time of the thirty years' war

Although now forgotten, Paul Nagel was one of the most notorious seventeenth-century critics of orthodox Lutheranism. His Prognosticon Astrologo-Cabalisticum (1618) and Stellae Prodigiosae (1619), in which he sketched a complex astrological-prophetic system, were followed by numerous books and pamphlets over the next five years in which he predicted the arrival of the Last Judgement in 1666. Although the failure of his prophecies for 1624 led to a collapse of interest in his prognostications, he turns out to have been a key figure in early seventeenth-century Protestantism. How he strayed from his original orthodox position is the subject of this essay.