Abraham von Franckenberg

Abraham von Franckenberg (24 June 1593 – 25 June 1652) was a German mystic, author, poet and hymn-writer.

Abraham von Franckenberg was born in 1593 into an old Silesian noble family in Ludwigsdorf bei Oels. He attended the Gymnasium in Brieg and the University of Leipzig and looked set to become a lawyer; however, he abandoned his studies in 1617 and was drawn to more ascetic and mystical ideas. By 1622, he was familiar with the works of Jakob Böhme, and he met the mystic in person the following year. Franckenberg would continue to revere Böhme even after the latter’s death in 1624, and was a friend to several of Böhme's other followers, such as the Liegnitz physician Balthasar Walther.

He inherited the family estate in Ludwigsdorf in 1623, but passed it on to his brother Balthasar in exchange for the right to keep a few small rooms in the family home. He lived a very reclusive life and rarely ventured forth from this room – only in 1634 to attend to those suffering from plague, and in 1640 to challenge the rhetoric of Georg Seidel, a Lutheran preacher from Oels whom Franckenberg regarded as intolerant.

Tired of this and other confrontations, and mindful of the fact that events of the Thirty Years’ War were moving in the direction of Silesia, Franckenberg moved to Danzig via Breslau in 1641, where he lodged until 1649 with the astronomer Johannes Hevelius, who introduced him to Copernican astronomy. He spent the winter of 1642-43 in Holland, where he had several works by Böhme published.

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