Archimedes NEW STUDIES IN THE HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY VOLUME 55 EDITOR Jed Z. Buchwald, Dreyfuss Professor of History, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA ASSOCIATE EDITORS FOR MATHEMATICS AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES Jeremy Gray, The Faculty of Mathematics and Computing, The Open University, UK Tilman Sauer, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany ASSOCIATE EDITORS FOR BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES Sharon Kingsland, Department of History of Science and Technology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA Manfred Laubichler, Arizona State University, USA ADVISORY BOARD FOR MATHEMATICS, PHYSICAL SCIENCES AND TECHNOLOGY Henk Bos, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands Mordechai Feingold, California Institute of Technology, USA Allan D. Franklin, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA Kostas Gavroglu, National Technical University of Athens, Greece Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany Trevor Levere, University of Toronto, Canada Jesper Lützen, Copenhagen University, Denmark William Newman, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA Lawrence Principe, The Johns Hopkins University, USA Jürgen Renn, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany Alex Roland, Duke University, USA Alan Shapiro, University of Minnesota, USA Noel Swerdlow, California Institute of Technology, USA ADVISORY BOARD FOR BIOLOGY Michael Dietrich, Dartmouth College, USA Michel Morange, Centre Cavaillès, Ecole Normale Supérieure, France Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany Nancy Siraisi, Hunter College of the City University of New York, USA Archimedes has three fundamental goals; to further the integration of the histories of science and technology with one another: to investigate the technical, social and practical histories of specific developments in science and technology; and finally, where possible and desirable, to bring the histories of science and technology into closer contact with the philosophy of science. To these ends, each volume will have its own theme and title and will be planned by one or more members of the Advisory Board in consultation with the editor. Although the volumes have specific themes, the series itself will not be limited to one or even to a few particular areas. Its subjects include any of the sciences, ranging from biology through physics, all aspects of technology, broadly construed, as well as historically-engaged philosophy of science or technology. Taken as a whole, Archimedes will be of interest to historians, philosophers, and scientists, as well as to those in business and industry who seek to understand how science and industry have come to be so strongly linked. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5644 H Darrel Rutkin Sapientia Astrologica: Astrology, Magic and Natural Knowledge, ca. 1250–1800 I. Medieval Structures (1250-1500): Conceptual, Institutional, Socio-Political, Theologico-Religious and Cultural H Darrel Rutkin Dipartimento di Filosofia e Beni Culturali Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia Dorsoduro, Venezia, Italy ISSN 1385-0180 ISSN 2215-0064 (electronic) Archimedes ISBN 978-3-030-10778-9 ISBN 978-3-030-10779-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10779-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018968012 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Preface Daily newspaper horoscopes are like a text message from Athena. —Sophia Joy Rutkin, age 13. Astrology currently plays a variety of complex and often controversial roles in the contemporary early twenty-first-century’s increasingly globalized world—East and West, including Europe and America1—sometimes functioning even in the highest corridors of power. Nancy Reagan, the wife of Ronald Reagan (1911–2004), the 40th president of the United States (1981–1989), famously used an astrologer from San Francisco, Joan Quigley, to time a broad range of official activities and announcements to her husband’s best political advantage. To do so, she used a tra- ditional astrological practice called “elections,” namely, the choosing of astrologi- cally propitious times for beginning any sort of venture, many earlier examples of which will be seen in what follows.2 Apparently, François Mitterrand (1916–1996), the 21st President of France (1981–1995), also regularly sought astrological advice.3 Despite the virtually ubiquitous appearance of the daily newspaper sun-sign “horoscope,” an extremely watered down, twentieth-century expression of 1 I avoid the East almost entirely in what follows, due mainly to issues of competence and space, not lack of interest or widespread expression in either historical or contemporary India and the Islamic world, China (with its own indigenous ancient system), or other Eastern societies. The New York Times recently reported (6 January 2015) about astrology in contemporary Sri Lankan poli- tics: “As Vote Nears, Astrologer for Sri Lanka’s President Faces Ultimate Test of his Skills,” by Ellen Barry. 2 Joan Quigley, “What Does Joan Say?”: My Seven Years as White House Astrologer to Nancy and Ronald Reagan, New York: Birch Lane Press, 1990. Reagan was famously known as the “teflon president,” perhaps in part due to Quigley’s astrological interventions. 3 Elizabeth Teissier was his astrologer between 1989 and 1994; see Jon Henley, “How Mitterand Sought Advice from Astrologer,” The Observer, 25 June 2000 (http://www.theguardian.com/ world/2000/jun/25/jonhenley.theobserver2). Controversially, Teissier also earned a PhD in sociol- ogy at the Sorbonne with a thesis entitled, “Situation épistémologique de l’astrologie à travers l’ambivalence fascination / rejet dans les sociétés postmodernes,” in 2001. My thanks to Marco Gentile for bringing Teissier to my attention. v vi Preface ­astrology’s central structure4—a figure of the heavens coordinated for time and place, to be extensively discussed in what follows—and its periodic recrudescences in popular and/or esoteric psychological and religious contexts,5 astrology still inspires controversy today due to its persistently broad range of societal roles, even though today, of course, astrology has no purchase among scholars, scientific or humanistic, and is relegated to aficionados of the art and to believers. Surprisingly (or perhaps not!), astrology still provokes outcries of outrage, indig- nation and intolerance. In 1955, for example, at the time of the McCarthy investiga- tions (often described as “witchhunts”), the dean of American historians of science and the founder of Isis: An International Review Devoted to the History of Science and its Cultural Influences, George Sarton (1884–1956) of Harvard University insisted that astrologers should be arrested and jailed for their beliefs and practices, due to his profound suspicion that they were preying on society.6 Similarly, in 1972, Wayne Shumaker (1910–1999),7 a distinguished professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, devoted the first extensive chapter of his influen- tial The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study in Intellectual Patterns to debunking the science, art, and/or practice of astrology, due explicitly to his alarm at its perceived deleterious effects on his impressionable undergraduates in the Berkeley of the late 1960s and early 1970s.8 Finally, in its September/October 1975 issue, The Humanist, an organ of secular humanism in America, published an attack on astrology that included an oath reject- ing astrology signed by 186 scientists. This provoked a characteristically harsh criti- cal firebombing (Feyer-bombing!) of their entire enterprise by Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994), a distinguished and controversial philosopher of science also at UC Berkeley.9 Feyerabend’s arguments are very interesting indeed and strike a sugges- tive tone for the study that follows, where far too much ideologically laden and mostly unconscious assumption, assertion, prejudice and wishful thinking has passed for critical historical scholarship. * 4 For newspaper astrology in the England of the 1930s, see Ellic Howe’s illuminating, Astrology: A Recent History including the Untold Story of its Role in World War II, New York: Walker and