Overall Conclusion to Volume I

Overall Conclusion to Volume I The Annus Mirabilis of 1484: Towards “Renaissance” Astrology and Magic Introduction Astrologizing Aristotelian natural philosophy held the day virtually unchallenged in the Middle Ages from the mid-13th throughout most of the fifteenth century, but that situation changed dramatically in the early years of the 1480s when Marsilio Ficino published his philosophical masterpiece, the Theologia Platonica, in 1482, and his epoch-making and extraordinarily influential translation of all of Plato’s works from Greek into Latin in 1484, to correspond, in fact, with the much antici- pated Great Conjunction in Scorpio of that year.1 Nevertheless, the medieval structures reconstructed in volume I provide the touchstone, the structures against which to measure the range of continuities and transformations in the Renaissance, the Reformation and early modern Europe. In this conclusion to volume I, I will first briefly resume these medieval structures in curricular-disciplinary and conceptual respects, and draw some final conclusions. Then I will address an epoch-making technological invention—the printing press with movable type—and its ever increasing importance to astrology (and vice versa) from the second half of the fifteenth century onwards. 1 In general, and with much detail, see James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance. Of course, Ficino also translated and published works by several Neoplatonists in the 1480s and ‘90s, including Plotinus, Iamblichus and Proclus, and he composed and published numerous of his own com- mentaries on Plato’s dialogues. Ficino’s Theologia Platonica is now easily accessible with a marvellous English translation in the I Tatti Renaissance Library; Platonic Theology, Latin text edited by James Hankins with William Bowen; English translation by Michael J.B. Allen, 6 vols., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001–2006. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 465 H D. Rutkin, Sapientia Astrologica: Astrology, Magic and Natural Knowledge, ca. 1250–1800, Archimedes 55, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10779-6 466 Overall Conclusion to Volume I [1] Medieval Structures As I have now shown in some depth and detail—and using a broad range of evi- dence—the disciplinary and curricular patterns characteristic of premodern Aristotelian-Ptolemaic-Galenic natural knowledge as taught at European universities ca. 1250-ca. 1500 provide the primary structures for developing sharper and more accurate analytic tools. With these tools I have constructed a well-articulated, flexible, and historically- and conceptually-sound interpretive framework to use in more sharply focusing and ultimately reframing the larger historical question of how astrology came to be removed from its previously central conceptual and institutional locations in medieval, Renaissance and early modern natural knowledge during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is also relevant for articulating both the significant differences and the deep-structural continuities between medieval and Renaissance astrology and magic (as I do in volume II), and in relation to Copernicus’s education and life’s work, and to those of other major Scientific Revolution figures, including Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton (to be treated in volume III) as well as for many other issues and figures not mentioned here. In approaching these larger questions, we must first accurately understand astrology’s status and locations in the medieval map of knowledge ca. 1250 to 1500, which eventually came to be so greatly transformed. In volume I, I have focused primarily on two scientific disciplines: mathematics and natural philosophy, although I have also taken the third, medicine, into account, albeit not as fully. Reconstructing characteristic features of these three bodies of knowledge—in all of which astrology was significantly configured—is a major component of my interpretive framework. As we have seen, in the mathematics curriculum, astrology as a theoretical and practical doctrine was taught as a central feature of the “science of the stars” along with mathematical astronomy, but only after the preliminary study of arithmetic and geometry. This integral configuration of astrology with astronomy differs greatly, of course, from our modern disciplinary structures, where astrology is no longer con- sidered a legitimate part of mathematics, nor is it taught as such in modern universities. Furthermore, astrology’s foundations in nature were taught in the natural philosophy course by reading core texts of Aristotle, most notably, the De caelo and De generatione et corruptione. Her foundations in medicine, in their turn, were taught in the medical course with core texts by Galen, including the De diebus decretoriis. To establish my interpretive framework, I have explored in detail the characteristic structures of these conceptual and curricular patterns by reconstructing their under- standing in the thirteenth century, and their further development and institutional- ization during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The basic curricular structures for astrology’s configuration within mathematics, natural philosophy and medicine were clearly articulated in the 1405 statutes for the University of Bologna, and were Overall Conclusion to Volume I 467 strikingly consistent until well into the seventeenth century, and in some places beyond. * I will now briefly recall the central conceptual structures of what I have come to call an “astrologizing Aristotelian” system of natural knowledge. As taught in Italian and other universities in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (and beyond), three main aspects of the topic received the most attention: natural philosophy, cos- mography, and a geometrical-optical model of planetary influences. According to Aristotle’s natural philosophy, the movements of the heavens, especially the sun, were utterly fundamental to life on earth. In De generatione et corruptione II.9–10, Aristotle argued that the sun in its annual motion around the ecliptic, as the univer- sal efficient cause, was ontologically prior to and necessary for generation and cor- ruption. Therefore, in processes of generation (human and otherwise), the sun as efficient cause was required along with the male, who provided the formal cause (the specific form) in the seed, and the female, who provided the material cause in the womb. In his commentary on this passage, Albertus Magnus expanded the realm of the efficient cause to also include the rest of the planets. In Book II ofDe caelo, Aristotle discussed celestial influences, which he limited to motion and light. The luminaries’ and planets’ motions and light both provided the basis for their mathe- matization. Albert also emphasized that these Aristotelian texts provided the natural philosophical/scientific foundations for astrological practice. These Aristotelian natural philosophical structures were fitted into a fundamen- tally Ptolemaic cosmographic framework, composed of mathematical astronomy calibrated with mathematical geography. This cosmographic framework allowed the planetary motions to be uniquely determined for any time at any place by means of the horizon. This is important because place was essential for analyzing the role of celestial influences in generation, as both Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon made abundantly clear. Once the planets’ motions were mapped in this way, and related to each place on earth, their influences could then be analyzed using the other primary feature of this system, a geometrical-optical model of planetary influences. These irradiating influences were thought to act omnidirectionally and in straight lines, on the model of the planets’ other mode of influence, light. The angular relationship of the planets to each other—the planetary aspects—and their collective relationship to each place on earth could then be fully articulated. When the different qualitative natures of each planet—in themselves and as modified by each sign of the zodiac—were taken into account, and the variation in effect from their varying angular relationships (both to themselves and to each place on earth), the result was an integrated and highly mathematicized natural philosophy of richness and sophistication. As we saw in Parts II and III, this astrologizing Aristotelian system of natural knowledge also provided the primary conceptual framework for analyzing astrology’s complex and sometimes controversial relationship to theology/religion and to magic, thus 468 Overall Conclusion to Volume I offering a range of fundamental conceptual, curricular and disciplinary structures for assessing both continuities and transformations that should all be taken into account in constructing a comprehensive framework. Establishing and properly historicizing this framework serves two fundamental and interrelated purposes in my study. First, it articulates astrology’s primary conceptual and institutional structures within the medieval map of knowledge (ca. 1250–1500), as I have done in volume I. Secondly, it provides a means to analyze in detail astrology’s gradual removal from this central position and other relevant questions to be explored in volumes II and III. The interpretive framework pre- sented here is intended to orient future research in this utterly central yet incom- pletely understood part of the history of science and culture. It may also be used to grind more accurate conceptual lenses through which to examine

Load more