Abstract
Reviled by Pico della Mirandola, revered by Kepler, enriched by writings of ancient authorities from east and west, and regarded with suspicion by ecclesiastical officials and with deepest seriousness by literary figures, artists, physicians, and many others throughout medieval and modern times, astrology has continued to engage the interest of historians at least since Aby Warburg and Otto Neugebauer made the first tentative steps to understand it as a historical phenomenon.
This learned volume presents contributions by participants in an international conference held at the Warburg Institute in 2008 on medieval and Renaissance astrology. Charles Burnett and Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum have preferred a light editorial touch. The chapters are in alphabetical rather than systematic order and summaries are supplied by the contributors themselves. Generous half-page multilingual footnotes add to the usefulness. The expertise is particularly wide-ranging, including linguists, historians, a naturalist, and more than one practicing astrologer. Not surprisingly, there are some differences, including the definition of the central subject. No one denies the all-pervasiveness, in the period under study, of the premise regarding planetary influences. But was astrology a science? Geoffrey Cornelius, referencing work by Greenbaum, sees it as a stochastic art, more like poetry and divination than like science. Miquel Forcada, however, examining the Arab tradition in Andalusia, sees it as being embedded in “the scientific practices of the time, including agriculture” (p. 150). Josefina Rodriguez-Arribas seeks to demonstrate how it attempted to achieve a rapprochement with medieval science by introducing a quantitative orientation especially in the concepts of power and strength. Still in the late sixteenth century, suggests Bernadette Brady, there was more to Galileo’s astrological engagement than a few horoscopes done for friends and patrons; indeed, the Arab astrological works he studied may have provided for him an anti-Aristotelian “thinking space” at the edge of scientific change.
Astrology drew upon a variety of traditions. A major accomplishment of the volume is to bring together the major strands of thought from ancient classical, Byzantine, Arab, and Jewish authors, often in tandem or in combination. Especially associated with the medieval revival of astrology, Arab traditions are explored by Jan Hogendijk, who provides a commentary to accompany a future edition of work written by the eleventh-century scholar al-Bīrūnī for the sultan of Ghazna. Giuseppe Bezza, drawing on work by David Pingree, Wolfgang Hübner, and Burnett, traces Arab conjunctionism from the fundamental ninth-century work of Abū Maʿshar down through the emergence of rival theories of power and influence deriving from the Renaissance revival of classical antiquity. Julio Samsó analyses texts by the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century writers Ibn Qunfudh and al-Baqqār, the latter developing themes in the thirteenth-century Libro de las Cruzes produced under King Alfonso X. Here as in the Christian tradition, a defence of astrology may consider the heavenly bodies as instruments of divine will. Petra Schmidl takes us to Hijaz on the Arabian Peninsula in the twelfth century where Ibn Rāhīq joined traditional learning and folk wisdom in a text analysed here that details the best times for undertaking activities, ranging from marriage to warfare, based on the lunar mansion, that is, the particular zodiacal sign or group of stars that the moon passes on any given day of the month. Two contributors focus on the often-cited works of the twelfth-century Jewish philosopher Abraham Ibn Ezra: Meira Epstein demonstrates his didactic intentions and strategies and Schlomo Sela explores his attempts to build a Hebrew vocabulary for astrology. Piergabriele Mancuso examines medieval Judaeo-Byzantine astrological traditions in the south of Italy. Exemplifying the persistence of the Graeco-Arab and Judaeo-Byzantine traditions well into the seventeenth century is Nicholas Culpepper’s Herbal, studied by Graeme Tobyn, where an eclectic mix of authorities supports assigning particular herbs to particular planets and parts of the body.
As promised by the editors, content takes precedence over context, so we are told more about what astrologers said than about their foibles and fortunes and even less about the larger matters in which they and their like occasionally found themselves embroiled. Hence, numerous contributions provide close readings of specific texts or series of texts. Robert Hand, for instance, compares texts by Guido Bonatti (thirteenth century) and his Arab source Sahl b. Bishr, revealing Bonatti to have been his own man as far as military matters were concerned. Stephen Heilen examines fifteenth-century writings by Paul of Middleburg on the great conjunction and solar eclipse of 1484–1485, explaining the divergences from the standard early medieval text of conjunctionism, Abū Ma’shar, along with the convergences with the ancient Roman text of Firmicus Maternus and certain internal inconsistencies. H. Darrel Rutkin analyses notes by Girolamo Ristori commenting on the ancient text of Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos for a sixteenth-century lecture series at the University of Pisa, which Ristori’s successor, Filippo Fantoni, was careful to edit, removing any references to the persecuted prophet Girolamo Savonarola.
Exceptions to the internalist bias include Steven Vanden Broecke, concerning the widely-diffused genre of annual prognostications, which current historiography has interpreted as a sort of sensationalism or fear-mongering designed to draw attention to the astrologer for purposes connected with social advancement. Instead, he argues that most forecasts tended to induce stability, with a perspective somewhat vaguely balanced between individual volition, divine will, and stellar destiny. In a similar vein, Jean-Patrice Boudet traces the tradition of city horoscopes from ancient times to the seventeenth century, identifying the predominant approach of retrospective history, that is, looking in the past for themes seemingly borne out by the horoscope, from the utopian approach of Tommaso Campanella, where the ideal city is said to be built on the day of the ideal horoscope, an approach also followed for the early medieval city of Baghdad.
On the whole, the high quality promised by the volume’s origins is borne out in a significant addition to the growing literature.