Astrology in the Early Modern Period: Practices and Concepts
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Astrology in the Early Modern Period: Practices and Concepts Steven Vanden Broecke Department of History, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium Keywords
Astronomy · Care of the self · Medicine · Religion
Introduction Between c. 1240 and c. 1660, astrology was a robust part of Europe’s philosophical traditions. Firmly wedded to mathematics and natural philosophy, it was the need to secure astrology’s prognostic capabilities which often drove the emergence of modern approaches to astronomy (Westman 2011). Astrology was also adopted by theologians and medical doctors as a privileged tool for exploring the natural vagaries of the Church body, the body politick, and human bodies. All this quickly collapsed, however, in the second and third quarters of the seventeenth century. According to a well-entrenched narrative, Europe’s scientific and philosophical elites rapidly began to move on, while astrology remained confined to more popular strata of society or
home-brewed esoteric strands of modern bourgeois culture (Vanden Broecke 2016). Inevitably, astrology’s early modern academic “death” or “fall from grace” casts a long shadow on any attempt to present a historical narrative of the art’s trajectory in this period. It is particularly hard to neutralize the impact of contemporary academic qualifications of astrology (“pseudoscience,” “irrational”) on historical interpretations of the nature and essence of astrology. As a result, historical narratives that set out to describe the early modern trajectory of astrology, often end up prescribing it instead. This entry tries to circumvent this pitfall by adopting two methodological presuppositions. First, no one (historical actor or historian) owns the “true” denotation of the term “astrology.” Astrology was heavily contested in the early modern period, and even its precise nature or essence largely depended on whoever spoke in its name. This phenomenon was reinforced by the fact that rejection of astrological beliefs and practices often served as a mere shibboleth signaling loyalty and identity to a variety of causes, including “reason” and “piety.” Because the meaning of “astrology” is underdetermined by the historical record, this entry will largely focus on the early modern languages and practices that were woven around terms like “astrology” or “science of the stars.” For practical purposes, this entry accordingly takes a broad interpretation of astrology, which I will here define as those discourses and practices that engage the conviction that other
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 D. Jalobeanu, C. T. Wolfe (eds.), Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_582-1
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Astrology in the Early Modern Period: Practices and Concepts
celestial bodies than the Sun, also effect direct and significant change in living sublunary bodies. Our second presupposition follows from this contested status of early modern astrology: approaching early modern discourse on astrology through the basic distinction between “believers” and
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