Until the Danish Reformation of 1536, learned Danish noblemen had inevitably been clergymen. During the Reformation, however, the episcopal offices and episcopal estates that they had just as inevitably monopolized were seized by the crown and turned over to suitably accredited Lutheran “superintendents” of middle-class background who posed no problems in respect to either loyalty or competence. The lower-level cathedral chapters, not offering the wealth or power of the episcopal offices, were still accessible to the nobility. It had been common before the Reformation to reward royal secretaries and various other crown servants with canonical prebends, and it remained so afterward. And because the noblemen who were now excluded from high office in the church began to dominate crown and chancery offices more than ever before, canonry incomes were increasingly diverted to the nobility. After the radical changes of 1536, however, these royal servants were no longer clerics but, instead, Lutheran laymen. From 14 May 1568, Tycho Brahe knew that he would one day be one of them.

Before the Reformation, formal education was associated with clerical celibacy. And because clerical celibacy was a threat to familial continuity, no aristocratic parents could send more than one or two of their sons to university. But after the Reformation they could, and some of them did, not so their sons could become universal men or achieve satisfaction and even glory, in the terms of the Italian Renaissance, but, rather, so they could be better trained to fulfill the traditional role of their class: service to the realm.