Abstract
Writing the history of astrology poses a peculiar set of interpretive problems, as authors cannot assume that their readers will have fundamental knowledge of the subject. Historians are thus required to inform their readers of at least some of the basics before turning to detailed analyses, as Monica Azzolini did recently, and as Anthony Grafton and Laura A. Smoller had done a few years ago. 1
I mention Azzolini’s recent contribution first because she insightfully analysed astrology’s important roles in the public and private life of Renaissance Milan, and especially its ruling family, the Sforza, c. 1450–1510. Since politics is central to her story, Azzolini vividly described the rich tapestry of Milanese politics as embedded in the Italian and international context, offering a richly learned and expansive bibliographical apparatus of archival and published primary and secondary sources. Azzolini wove astrological theory and its several practices into an account of the vibrant life of the city and its inhabitants, from the Sforza dukes themselves to their wives and children, courtiers and political functionaries, allies and enemies, richly revealing how deeply astrology penetrated Renaissance public and private life in the highest strata of society.
Hayton’s book, on the other hand, offers little information about the technical content of the sciences under consideration. He confusingly spells out astronomy’s relation to astrology in a brief, two-page discussion (pp. 2–4) misleadingly entitled “Astrology as Natural Knowledge,” which does not in fact discuss this topic. Nor does he orient the reader by describing the four basic types of Renaissance astrological practice – revolutions, nativities, elections, and interrogations – although he refers to and briefly describes the first three at various points throughout his study. An introductory section that set out these basic structures would have been extremely useful to many readers and would have established the author’s bona fides with his more learned readers.
When Hayton does discuss astrology in detail, I found some puzzling errors. For example, a central structure of historical astrology was the doctrine of great conjunctions. He rightly divides them into three types: great, greater, and greatest, but he never tells readers what differentiates one type from another, beyond that “great” conjunctions happen every “60” years – they really happen every 20 years (perhaps this is a typo?) – “greater” every 240 and “greatest” every 960 years (p. 44). He does not explain that the shift from great to greater to greatest derives from the regular triangular patterns along the ecliptic where successive mean conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn occur. These conjunctions recur every 20 years in zodiacal signs of the same elemental triplicity (fire, earth, air, or water) for a period of 240 years before shifting into the next triangular set of signs of the next element for the following 240 years. This shift of triplicity marks a “greater” conjunction; the completion of all four shifts marks a “greatest” conjunction.
Furthermore, when he does later mention these shifts in elemental triplicity, Hayton reveals that he does not understand this basic material. In discussing one of the central figures of his story, Georg Tanstetter, Hayton states, “The great conjunction that occurred in 1524 was, however, more significant than most. This time, Saturn and Jupiter would conjoin in a new triplicity, shifting from an air sign to a water sign” (p. 180). However, the conjunctions had been in watery signs for a century, as Hayton himself noted later in this same discussion: “In 1503 and 1504 [namely the previous great conjunction that took place twenty years before, despite his earlier statement that they only happen every sixty years], Mars, Jupiter and Saturn had repeatedly conjoined in the water sign of Cancer” (p. 184). Thus, by the evidence he himself presents, there was no shift in triplicity between the 1503/1504 and 1524 great conjunctions. Such confusion about simple matters, clearly analysed in recent scholarship published in English (e.g. Smoller and North), shakes my confidence in Hayton’s understanding of even the most basic elements of astrology, which may account for why he discusses them so thinly.
In The Crown and the Cosmos, Darin Hayton states clearly and repeatedly – with repetition being his primary argumentative strategy – that his book will examine the role that astrology played for Maximilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor who lived from 1459 to 1519, although you will not find these dates mentioned as such anywhere in the book, let alone at the beginning when introducing his subject. Hayton emphasizes, but with little detail, astrology’s importance to the construction of Maximilian’s self-image and its projection to a broad spectrum of society by means of a range of texts and images printed in Latin and German and distributed far and wide. In this, he is deeply indebted to Larry Silver’s study, Marketing Maximilian: The Visual Ideology of a Holy Roman Emperor (Princeton 2008), which Hayton duly acknowledges. Hayton focuses particularly on works by Maximilian himself and by a small group of astronomer/astrologers associated with both the University of Vienna and Maximilian’s court: Joseph Grünpeck, Andreas Stiborius, Johannes Stabius, Georg Tannstetter, and Andreas Perlach.
The structure of Hayton’s book is straightforward. First, he tersely treats astrology in Maximilian’s autobiographical works as imperial propaganda (Chapters 1 and 2) and in the process points to very interesting material, such as Sebastian Brant’s astrological propaganda (pp. 39 ff.). Next, a series of chapters treat the teaching and practice of astrology, focusing on different instruments and texts, including ephemerides and prognostications, by Stiborius, Stabius, Tannstetter, and Perlach. Hayton emphasizes over and over that by gathering together and patronizing these scientific practitioners, Maximilian created a pool of scholars on whose expertise he could draw when making pragmatic decisions or when burnishing his own legitimacy and authority. After the works of Azzolini, Smoller, and Grafton, such a thesis is reasonable, certainly not surprising. But repeating the thesis over and over does not substitute for detailed engagement with evidence that might reveal local peculiarities in the astrological enterprise of Renaissance Europe.
For example, a deeper discussion of the astrological curriculum at the University of Vienna would have been valuable. Hayton refers several times to an article by Claudia Kren and to several hefty German tomes but never describes these curricular structures, although he does note in a footnote (28, p. 254) that the pseudo-Ptolemaic Centiloquium was taught there. Comparison with the well-known 1405 statutes of the University of Bologna would have been useful as would more information on the Viennese College of Poets and Mathematicians. Hayton foregoes the opportunity to compare Vienna’s astrological infrastructures with those we know in other places, being content merely to reference the relevant scholarly treatments.
On the other hand, I did learn about Stabius’ Horoscopion, which Hayton keeps calling an astrological instrument, although it is basically a clever graphical device for converting among various schemes to count the hours of the day (starting at noon or sunset) at different geographical latitudes. It can indeed have astrological uses, as Hayton points out, for both constructing horoscopes and performing elections, and it may well have established Stabius’ mathematical bona fides. Whether Maximilian actually used it for astrological purposes, however, needs to be established on the basis of evidence, not simply by repeatedly stating that it is so. Hayton also presents interesting annotated imprints, documenting contemporary reader responses to astrological texts (pp. 156, 179), but this material too could have been developed more fully.