ALBERT S. COOK, EDITOR LX THE MEDIEVAL ATTITUDE TOWARD ASTROLOGY PARTICULARLY IN ENGLAND BY THEODORE OTTO WEDEL A Dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS MDCCCCXX PREFACE Mediæval astrology has long suffered a neglect which, judged intrinsically, it deserves. Little more than a romantic interest now attaches to a complex divinatory art that for centuries has been looked upon as one of the aberrations of the human mind. When viewed historically, however, astrology is seen to have occupied a place in art and philosophy which many a later science might envy, and which, consequently, it is not well to ignore. Ancient astrology, indeed, has already received in recent years close and appreciative study. The poem of Manilius has never lost its appeal for the classicist; and the prominence of astrological thought in ancient philosophy and ethics has frequently aroused the curiosity of scholars. A history of mediæval astrology, on the other hand, still remains to be written. Yet for the men of the thirteenth century, even more than for the poets and philosophers of Greece and Rome, the rule of the stars over human destinies was an indisputable fact, entering into their every conception of the universe. In that sudden revival of Aristotelian and Arabian learning which, in the twelfth century, heralded the scholastic age, astrology was hailed as the chief of the sciences. Although a long warfare with theology had to precede its acceptance by mediæval orthodoxy, its final triumph was complete. Theologians dared to credit the stars with a power second only to that of God himself. When Chaucer, in lines echoing Dante's Inferno, exclaims O influences of thise hevenes hye! Soth is, that, under God, ye ben our hierdes, he is expressing the conviction of the best mediaval thinkers. Astrology, offering, as it did, a reasoned explana 359057 tion of an infinite diversity of physical phenomena, and including in its scope psychology and ethics, made possible even in the Middle Ages dreams of a universal science. I have endeavored in this dissertation to trace the development of medieval thought concerning astrology from Augustine to the fifteenth century, and to interpret references to it in medieval English literature. The larger purpose was a direct outgrowth of the second—a summary of astrological passages in Old and Middle English proving barren without an interpretative background. It will be easily recognized that the treatment of mediæval astrology as a whole is cursory and incomplete. A field so little explored as that of Arabian and Jewish science offers countless difficulties to the novice. But the general trend of astrological opinion in the Middle Ages seemed not impossible of discovery, and called for at least a tentative explanation. The recent investigations of several scholars have encouraged my interest in the present work. Professor Tatlock's studies on the astrology of Chaucer were responsible for my first intelligent view of the problem. Some twenty pages of incidental exposition in his Scene of the Franklin's Tale Visited constitute the most suggestive monograph of medieval astrology with which I am acquainted. The earlier volumes of Duhem's Système du Monde also aided me in matters bibliographical, and in outlining the evolution of scientific ideas from Aristotle to modern times. Although my introductory discussion of ancient astrology is based upon Bouchè-Leclercq's Astrologie Grecque, I have endeavored to interpret the early history of the science in the light of its later development. The principal contribution of the present study, in fact, will be found to consist in an attempt to explain the medieval attitude toward astrology as the result of a combat between an ecclesiastical hostility, inherited from the ancient Church, and the increasingly insistent demands of Arabian science. |