Albert the Greatâ•Žs Speculum Astronomiae and Four Centuries Of

University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 8-2007 God’s Deaf and Dumb Instruments: Albert the Great’s Speculum astronomiae and Four Centuries of Readers Scott Edward Hendrix University of Tennessee - Knoxville Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Hendrix, Scott Edward, "God’s Deaf and Dumb Instruments: Albert the Great’s Speculum astronomiae and Four Centuries of Readers. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2007. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/186 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Scott Edward Hendrix entitled "God’s Deaf and Dumb Instruments: Albert the Great’s Speculum astronomiae and Four Centuries of Readers." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in History. Thomas Burman, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Irven Resnick, Michael Kulikowski, Robert Bast, Denise Phillips Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Scott Edward Hendrix entitled “God’s Deaf and Dumb Instruments: Albert the Great’s Speculum astronomiae and Four Centuries of Readers.” I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in history. Thomas Burman Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Irven Resnick Michael Kulikowski Robert Bast Denise Phillips Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges, Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official student records.) God’s Deaf and Dumb Instruments: Albert the Great’s Speculum Astronomiae And Four Centuries of Readers A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Scott Edward Hendrix August 2007 ii Copyright © Scott Edward Hicks 2007 iii Abstract “God’s Deaf and Dumb Instruments: Albert the Great’s Speculum Astronomiae and Four Centuries of Readers” is a study of the reception and influence of what is perhaps the most important work dealing with astrology to be produced in the Latin West during the middle ages. In order to determine the impact and importance of the Speculum I have dealt with questions relating to its authorship and dating, while studying its contents in the context of Albert’s larger body of work as well as the readers who found it useful and how they approached the Speculum. I have studied these readers both directly, through a study of thirty-five of the fifty-nine surviving manuscripts, as well as indirectly through a consideration of the way that other writers used the Speculum through the end of the fifteenth century. In the course of my research I travelled to archives in England, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and the United States to study codices containing the Speculum, as well as examining microfilm copies of volumes housed in the Ambrosiana collection of Notre Dame University and in the Pope Pius XII Vatican Film Library at St. Louis University. My focus was upon the works that came to be bound with the Speculum and the marginalia readers left behind, as well as the accuracy of individual copies of the text. Furthermore, I have studied the writings of an array of authors, from the thirteenth- century physician Peter d’Abano, to the fifteenth-century humanist Pico della Mirandola, to determine how these scholars viewed astrology and the place of the Speculum in their writings. In this way I have been able to demonstrate that astrology was central to the medieval worldview of intellectual elites. The Speculum astronomiae, which I demonstrate was indeed written by Albert the Great around the year 1260, served as an important component of the preservation of the study and practice of astrology as a discipline permissible to Christians. Standing as a semi-canonical defense of the science, physicians, astrologers, natural philosophers, and those interested in doctrinal purity read it with profit, while both defenders and detractors of astrology found it important to address the Speculum in their own work. iv Table of Contents Chapter I Defending Albert’s reputation? A consideration of the controversy concerning the authorship of the Speculum astronomiae. 1 Chapter II Faith and Reason in Conflict: Albert and the Speculum astronomiae 38 Chapter III The Link Between Natural Philosophy and Metaphysics: The Place of Astrology in Albert the Great’s System of Thought 61 Chapter IV Coming to terms with the work of “the wonder and miracle of our time:” Readers and their approach to the Speculum astronomiae 114 Chapter V Whether for it or against it, you can’t ignore it: Readers and the Speculum astronomiae 187 Chapter VI The death and reincarnation of an authority 239 Select Bibliography 265 Appendix 288 Vita 334 1 Chapter I Defending Albert’s reputation? A consideration of the controversy concerning the authorship of the Speculum astronomiae. Lynn Thorndike’s encyclopedic 1923 History of Magic and Experimental Science describes the work generally known as the Speculum astronomiae as “one of the most important single treatises in the history of medieval astrology.” 1 The existence of fifty- nine surviving manuscripts, scattered from Harvard’s F.A. Countway Medical Library to the Biblioteka Jagiellonska in Krakow,2 certainly supports Thorndike’s assessment. Furthermore, authors from Pietro d’Abano to Pico della Mirandolla cite the Speculum or provide indications that it influenced their own work.3 Despite such evidence of the importance of the Speculum, the scholarship upon this work has been comparatively sparse and of a rather limited nature. In 1910 scholars began to focus upon questions of authorship and dating, paying limited attention to the contents of the Speculum or its 1 Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923), II, 692; Agostino Paravicini Bagliani Le Speculum Astronomiae, une énigme? Enquête sur le manuscripts (Sismel: Edizioni del Galluzo, 2001), 81-92. Bagliani argues at length that the title Speculum astronomiae was but one of the titles that medieval readers applied to this work. While De licitis et illicitis libris may have been a more common title, as he suggests, almost a century of modern scholarship has standardized the usage of the title, Speculum astronomiae. Therefore it seems best to maintain that use in order to avoid confusion. Astronomy and astrology, were, in fact, only nominally separated. Such a separation as there was owed more to cultural factors in the Arabic East affecting the way the study of the heavens was treated in the Muslim world, than to any natural division between the celestial sciences. Thus, by the time the Latin West received astrology and astronomy through Arabic intermediaries, the most important of which was Albumasar, the two were treated with a distinction that Ptolemy would not have recognized. Still, by the time that the study of the heavens was revived in Western Europe, the distinction was great enough that it should be observed. See Scott Hendrix, “Reading the Future and Freeing the Will: Astrology of the Arabic World and Albertus Magnus,” Hortulus 2.1 (2006). 2 Bagliani provides a list on pages 3-4. 3 Bruno Nardi, “Intorno alle dottrine filosofiche di Pietro d'Abano,” Saggi sull'Aristotelismo Padovano del secolo XIV al XVI (Florence: C.C. Sansoni, 1958): 19-69; 29-37; Pico della Mirandola, Disputationes Adversus Astrologiam Divinatricem, ed. Eugenio Garin (Florence: Vallecchi Editore, 1946), I, 66. 2 historical importance.4 The only work thus far to consider the influence of the Speculum in any depth is Nicolas Weill-Parot’s Les “images astrologiques” au moyen âge et à la renaissance, and this study maintains a relatively narrow focus, as the title suggests.5 While the considerations of authorship and dating that have primarily occupied scholars interested in the Speculum up to this point have yielded much of importance and interest, there is still a great deal to be understood about this key text. This study focuses upon the reception and influence of the Speculum. In order to understand properly this work’s place within the intellectual milieu of medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation Europe my starting point is the content of the Speculum as understood through the larger body of Albert’s writings, in conjunction with the historical context that molded him as a writer. But this only tells the beginning of the story. For the rest, I rely upon a close examination of thirty-two of the fifty-nine extant manuscripts so that we may better understand how readers approached these texts. In this way, we shall see that the Speculum articulated

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