Authors:
- Analyzes astrology's removal from legitimate practice
- Integrates medieval and early modern analyses
- Offers a new interpretation of astrology’s premodern scientific and theological foundations
Part of the book series: Archimedes (ARIM, volume 55)
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Table of contents (11 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Conceptual Structures (1) Astrology and Natural Philosophy/Science: Reconstructing a Thirteenth Century Astrologizing Aristotelianism
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Front Matter
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Conceptual Structures (2): Astrology and Theology/Religion
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Front Matter
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Conceptual Structures (3): Astrology and Magic
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Front Matter
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Institutional, Socio-political and Cultural Structures: Universities, Cities and Courts (1300–1500)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
This book explores the changing perspective of astrology from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era. It introduces a framework for understanding both its former centrality and its later removal from legitimate knowledge and practice. The discussion reconstructs the changing roles of astrology in Western science, theology, and culture from 1250 to 1500.
The author considers both the how and the why. He analyzes and integrates a broad range of sources. This analysis shows that the history of astrology—in particular, the story of the protracted criticism and ultimate removal of astrology from the realm of legitimate knowledge and practice—is crucial for fully understanding the transition from premodern Aristotelian-Ptolemaic natural philosophy to modern Newtonian science.
This removal, the author argues, was neither obvious nor unproblematic. Astrology was not some sort of magical nebulous hodge-podge of beliefs. Rather, astrology emerged in the 13th century as a richlymathematical system that served to integrate astronomy and natural philosophy, precisely the aim of the “New Science” of the 17th century. As such, it becomes a fundamentally important historical question to determine why this promising astrological synthesis was rejected in favor of a rather different mathematical natural philosophy—and one with a very different causal structure than Aristotle's.Keywords
- Astrology and the history of science
- Astrology and medieval science
- Astrology and magic (talismans)
- Astrology and medieval philosophy
- Astrology and the Scientific Revolution
- Astrologizing Aristotelianism
- Aristotelian Natural Philosophy
- Albertus Magnus
- Speculum astronomiae
- Roger Bacon
- Thomas Aquinas
- Mathematics and Humanism
- mathematical system
- Aristotelian-Ptolemaic
- Annus Mirabilis of 1484
- Revolutions Intermezzo
- Opera et verba sapientiae
Reviews
Authors and Affiliations
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Dipartimento di Filosofia e Beni Culturali, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Dorsoduro, Italy
H Darrel Rutkin
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Sapientia Astrologica: Astrology, Magic and Natural Knowledge, ca. 1250-1800
Book Subtitle: I. Medieval Structures (1250-1500): Conceptual, Institutional, Socio-Political, Theologico-Religious and Cultural
Authors: H Darrel Rutkin
Series Title: Archimedes
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10779-6
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-10778-9Published: 09 May 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-10779-6Published: 24 April 2019
Series ISSN: 1385-0180
Series E-ISSN: 2215-0064
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: LXXXIX, 515
Number of Illustrations: 9 b/w illustrations
Topics: History of Philosophy, History of Science, Intellectual Studies, History of Medieval Europe, History of Early Modern Europe