Introduction

Astrology, Almanacs, and the Early Modern English Calendar was first conceived as a handbook to English calendars in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and that remains its primary purpose. It teaches modern readers how to decipher Tudor and early Stuart calendars, outlines the evolution of the calendar, describes the form calendars took in early printed books, and tracks their development in the early modern printed almanac. The final part of the book is an illustrated guide to the seasons, months, and days of the week that synthesizes material from almanacs, prayer books, material artifacts, and farming guides in order to recuperate the visual and verbal iconography of time reckoning in the period. The book’s primary goal is to help scholars and students of early modern England unlock the vast cultural knowledge contained in calendars, and thereby to support further study and original scholarship on other topics in the field. It strives to be a helpful book that, like almanacs, will be used as much as read.

But calendars are far too complex to be understood in isolation from the culture that produced them. Calendars are man-made systems that divide up the unruly cycles of the natural world created by the spinning of the earth, its rotation around the Sun, and the movement of the Moon and other planets. Though tied to the astronomical realities of life on earth, the divisions created by any given calendar are arbitrary, devised by particular cultures in accordance with cosmological and theological beliefs of the time, in order to serve religious, social, and political needs.¹ Tudor and Stuart calendars specifically, like their late medieval antecedents, can only make sense to modern readers who understand the basic cosmological and medical theories that undergird them, especially the Ptolemaic astrology that made calendars of much richer and varied use to early moderns than the bare and basic calendars of the twenty-first century. For this reason, a guide to calendars inevitably became a guide to early modern popular astrology as well.

But calendars in early modern England are also not fully contained in the familiar twelve-month grids that annually align the days of the week with the date of the month, indicating holidays and leap year. From themedieval period onward, calendars in the compotus tradition had been structured as “anthologies,” in Faith Wallis’ useful description, which at-gave readers the tools they needed to use those calendars fully. From the mid-sixteenth century, calendars and such accompanying documents were most frequently found in England in the annual printed almanac. These almanacs might be thought of as extended calendars. The almanac supplemented those familiar twelve-month grids with additional information necessary for understanding the time reckoned in a given year. That information was astrological, astronomical, historical, agricultural, medical, and also religious, for early modern English calendars register the tectonic religious shifts of the Reformation.³ Material on those (and many other) topics was squeezed into the thirty-six or forty-eight pages of the standard early modern annual printed almanac and prognostication, the book-form in which calendars most frequently appeared in early modern England after the middle of the sixteenth century.⁴ In the end, then, this handbook to calendars and popular astrology in early modern England has also become a guide to the early modern printed almanacs in which such calendars appear.

tracted ancillary documents including treatises on time reckoning, medical guides, and humble poems on calendrical and other matters.² That additional material both extended the information in calendars, and

As a handbook, the rhetorical stance throughout this book is primarily explanatory, not argumentative. However, the book does have an agenda: it is that almanacs, and the popular, Christianized, Ptolemaic astrology they communicate, deserve greater attention in early modern studies, perhaps especially in the study of Shakespeare and the work of his literary contemporaries. That agenda repeats the hope expressed by Bernard Capp in 1989 in his magisterial Astrology and the Popular Press: The English Almanac 1500-1700, the indispensable guide for anyone working in this area: to “persuade specialists that, in almost every field, almanacs constitute a neglected source well worth further investigation.”⁵ That hope has been subsequently realized in a rich body of work on almanacs by scholars including Alison Chapman, Adam Smyth, Katherine Walker, and Louise Curth.⁶ But obstacles remain that have kept both almanacs and popular astrology on the sidelines of contemporary scholarship.

The first obstacle concerns the general reputation of the annual combined almanac and prognostication, which has had bad press from the moment the genre evolved in England in the fourth decade of the sixteenth century. In its day, the almanac was derided as a pathetic low level publication filled with errors, written by hacks, cheaply printed, and fully deserving of its ignominious repurposing every January 1st for lining book-bindings or privy paper. That derision can be seen in the title page woodcut of the first English mock almanac, the anonymous A Mery Pronosticación (1544); which replaces a standard image of Ptolemy pointing to the stars with the image of a jester surrounded by loons (Figure 1.1).

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Figure 1.1 Ptolemy and Jester, Anonymous, A Mery Pronosticación for the Yere of Chrystes Incarnacyon a Thousande Fyve Hundreth Fortye & Foure (1544), Title Page. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, RB 56465.

Such mockery grew in quantity and scornfulness in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, when the compilers of almanacs became a particular target. In Sir Thomas Overbury’s Sir Thomas Overburie His Wife (1616), for example, the “Almanacke-maker” is an ignorant charlatan who admires Ptolemy and Tycho Brahe but cannot understand them, who mis-predicts the weather (“for his judging at the uncertainty of weather, any old Shepheard shall make a Dunce of him”), and is exposed annually when his predictions lose all credibility “at the yeeres end, for time brings truth to light” (Glv-G2r). Richard Brathwaite’s Whimzies (1631) similarly takes aim at compilers’ pretensions to learning: “Horizons, Hemispheares, Horoscopes, Apogaeums, Hypogaeums, Perigaeums, Astrolages, Cycles, Epicycles are his usuall dialect; yet I am perswaded they may bee something to eate, for ought he knows” (A8v). By the start of the seventeenth century, the almanac had become a cultural shorthand for the ephemeral and unreliable; in John Marston’s Jack Drum’s Entertainment (1601), one character describes another’s affections as “uncertaine as an Almanacke, as unconstant as the fashion, Just like a whiffe of Tabacco, no sooner in at the mouth, but out at the nose.”⁸ Famously, the first director of the Bodleian Library refused to allow “baggage bookes” such as almanacs and plays into his collection.⁹ Mock almanacs included an Astrologicall Prognostication for 1591 by “Adam Fouleweather, Student in Asse-tronomy,” and a number of works adopt the bird motif of A Mery Prognostication: Thomas Dekker’s The Raven’s Almanacke (1609), Thomas Middleton’s The Owles Almanacke (1618), and the Poor Robin almanacs first published in the 1660s.¹⁰ The almanac’s credibility has not been helped by its subsequent evolution in nineteenth century America into a dubious annual collection of folk wisdom, execrable verse, and scientific nonsense.

In addition to the almanac’s sorry reputation, a second set of obstacles to its integration into early modern studies concerns accessibility. The first difficulty with access is a straightforward one: almanacs are hard for a modern reader to decipher. When seen in an exhibition or rare book repository, it is easy to marvel over their tiny size, their rubrication, the intriguing images of Zodiac Man, the horoscope charts, and the calendars that mark the location of the Moon to the degree and minute. But understanding these charts and their utility for their early modern owners demands knowledge of early modern astrological praxis that is not usually taught in graduate school. A second accessibility issue is more complex, a function of the methodology of literary and historical scholarship in the digital age. The vast majority of early printed almanacs are available on Early English Books Online (EEBO), the database that, in making the primary printed material of the early modern period available to scholars worldwide, has transformed and enriched our understanding of early English culture. But as scholars of the digital humanities well know, the structure of such databases influences the nature of the evidence they present. Given the sheer quantity of cultural material available on EEBO, the keyword search has become a standard tool for finding material on a given subject. Yet the annual almanacs do not turn up in keyword searches on EEBO because they are not—not a single one of them—available in fully searchable XML format.¹¹ One reason for this exclusion is that the books chosen for digitization by the Early English Text Creation Partnership are determined by their inclusion in the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. A product of its time, that bibliography favors works by the learned, the famous, the academic, the notorious, and the literary; almanac compilers, though often well credentialed as physicians or university-trained mathematical practitioners, do not rate in such a hierarchy.¹²

The effect of the exclusion of almanacs from full text in EEBO has been to shade them in a kind of digital invisibility cloak that distorts the almanac’s actual place in early modern cultural discourse. A good example of such distortion concerns the printed vernacular debates about astrology that began with William Fulke’s Antiprognosticon of 1560. Because of its author’s stature, Fulke’s pamphlet, like every single other vernacular attack on astrology before 1640, is available in searchable full text; anyone conducting a keyword search for astrology or related terms will turn up its devastating denouncement of astrology, partially aimed at the almanac. But it will not turn up any of the important responses to those attacks. For one thing, those mostly occur before the seventeenth century in almanac prefaces or letters to the reader, which are not available in full text. John Chamber’s A Treatise against Judicial Astrologie (1601) is available in searchable full text, but the massive 555-page response by Sir Christopher Heydon, A Defence of Judicial Astrologie (1603), is not. When it comes to popular astrology, then, an accident of database organization means that only one side of the argument is fully represented in the most important resource for tracking its discussion in print culture.

So the structural organization of EEBO—itself the product of the history of intellectual inquiry in the field—skews our understanding of attitudes towards astrology and the role of almanacs in cultural discourse. Because they are not searchable in full text, the only way to know what is in early modern almanacs is to read them. This introduces two more accessibility problems. First, early modern almanacs are rubricated. But cheap red ink fades, and it was apparently often not dark enough to register on the microfilms of early printed books that later became the basis for EEBO. As a result, almanacs are often simply—literally—illegible when found in that resource. They are fully accessible only in the archives. The final accessibility problem is one of plenty, rather than dearth. There are close to a thousand separate editions of annual almanacs extant from roughly 1540 to 1640; at that point, the numbers become even more absurdly inflated.¹³ Despite invaluable guides to this material in Capp’s Astrology and the still useful earlier bibliography by Eustace Bosanquet, it is difficult to sort through all these almanacs. Scholars specializing in the field recognize that “almanacs as a genre are far too diverse to be summed up in a single article,” yet much of the work on almanacs attempts exactly that.¹⁵ Though the available single chapter overviews of almanacs are scholarly sound, and keep almanacs on the academic radar, such brief treatments cannot hope to suggest the range of the genre.¹⁶ The tendency to generalize about almanacs has obscured the fact that they change over time; an Anthony Askham almanac for 1552, a William Cuningham almanac for 1564, a Gabriel Frende almanac for 1598, and a John Booker almanac for 1640 differ significantly from each other due to changes in the social, religious, technological, scientific, and economic conditions in which they were produced.

Another significant obstacle to the full consideration of almanacs in early modern culture is connected to astrology’s larger neglect in early modern historiography and literary studies. In 2001, Anthony Grafton and William R. Newman wrote that “[f]ew historians are willing, even now, to give astrology its due.”¹⁷ That issue has in many ways been redressed in the past twenty years. Astrology has indeed been given its due in work by Glyn Parry, Lauren Kassell, Steven Vanden Broeke, Brian Copenhaver, H. Darrell Rutkin, Ann Geneva, and Mark Dawson; by a superb collection edited by Brendan Dooley, A Companion to Astrology in the Renaissance (2014); by Robin B. Barnes’ Astrology and Reformation (2016); and by Grafton’s earlier monograph, Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (2001).¹⁸ In addition to Capp’s Astrology, Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1979) supplied an expansive, still useful overview of astrology’s scope and social significance. Over the years, literary scholars have contributed to the field, mostly by focusing on debates over the art and its representation in English literature, as in the work of Carroll Camden, Johnstone Parr, Don Cameron Allen, and Harry Rusche.¹⁹ But literary scholarship concerning astrology has never been extensive, and it does not always reflect awareness of the different branches of astrology and the art’s technical aspects. Unfamiliarity with astrology has led to significant misinterpretations of almanacs, calendars, and astrological references in literary texts. For example, literary scholarship does not always accurately register the distinction between the conjuring, summoning of spirits, and spell-casting of famous Renaissance magi such as Cornelius Agrippa or John Dee, on the one hand, and the relatively straightforward Ptolemaic astrology of the almanac on the other. As Barnes has written, the “ideas and methods” of the latter “were not magical for the simple reason that they were not operational; they sought not to manipulate or control nature, but merely to understand and adapt to it.”²⁰ Admittedly, the line between magic and science was a movable one in the early modern period, drawn differently by practitioners than it was by critics, and the boundary between magic and astrology was especially difficult to fix.²¹ The mathematical data thrown up by the practice of “exact astrology” was certainly used by conjurers, and also in alchemy—both operational arts.²² Yet the astrology of the almanacs had little to do with those more esoteric practices. That failure to discriminate different kinds (and uses) of astrology is reflected in explanatory notes to Shakespeare and other early modern literature that routinely characterize basic Ptolemaic astrology as a subset of magic or medieval “superstition.”²³ On the other hand, the claim that almanacs were harmless because they reflected “natural” rather than “judicial” astrology is also misleading. Those terms, though part of early modern polemic concerning the art, do not delineate actual astrological practice; the field is not divided into natural and judicial “branches.”²* The prognostications in almanacs were arrived at through judicial astrology, which involved the judgment of horoscope charts, though compilers were usually careful to avoid reporting on controversial subjects. These and other misconceptions have led to a misunderstandings of the references to popular Ptolemaic astrology that permeate both almanacs and early modern literature.

Astrology, Almanacs, and the Early Modern English Calendar seeks to remove such misconceptions while providing a guide to early modern English calendars that situates them firmly in the early history of printing and popular science. In Part I, four chapters provide resources for understanding early modern texts concerning astrology, calendars, and almanacs. The first chapter, “Astrology,” describes the practices of judicial astrology concerning calendars (known as revolutions), the lunar astrological medicine associated with calendars (connected to Zodiac Man), and other non-astrological prognostications that appear frequently in medieval and early modern calendars. The second chapter, “Calendars,” provides accounts of the Julian calendar, medieval compotus calculations and manuscripts, the late medieval folded medical almanac that was in many ways a precursor to the early modern almanac, and the printed primer calendars of the early sixteenth century that brought calendars to an ever widening market and register the impact of Protestant reform. Miscellaneous calendars such as clog almanacs and xylographic calendars are briefly discussed at the end of this chapter. The third chapter, “Almanacs and Prognostications,” covers the history of printed works in these genres in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, focusing especially on the economic and political factors—including the incorporation of the Company of Stationers and Elizabethan and Jacobean regulatory mechanisms—that shaped these printed works. The fourth chapter, “Related Publications and Controversies,” describes material useful for contextualizing the astrological almanac in the larger culture of popular scientific belief. This chapter discusses perpetual almanacs and guides to astrology, as well as the most pointed book and pamphlet attacks on almanacs, ending with an overview of Tudor and early Stuart mock almanacs. Part I as a whole is designed as a resource to be consulted with the help of the book’s index, to whatever extent is dictated by readers’ interests and prior knowledge. Its goal is to provide the vocabulary, cosmological theories, and historical context needed to understand the almanacs, calendars, and astrological practices illustrated in the second and third sections of Astrology, Almanacs, the Early Modern English Calendar.

Part II, “How to Read an Early Modern Almanac,” attempts to crack open the annual combined almanac and prognostication for modern readers. All efforts have been made to avoid the standard rhetorical ploy of the mock almanacs: the sonorous pronouncement of the obvious (almanacs have two title pages!). But at the same time, this part of the book takes almanacs seriously as material objects worth careful attention—books that organize vast amounts of material into different (and changing) graphic forms. Making almanacs legible and comprehensible in this way is, it is hoped, a first step for them to be considered in all their typographical, visual, and textual richness, as important works worth considering within the larger history of the book.²⁵

The third and final part of Astrology, Almanacs, the Early Modern English Calendar is designed as a reference guide to the qualities and cultural associations attached to the various increments of time as these were organized in early modern calendars: the seasons, the days of the week, and the months. Deeply indebted to earlier work on early modern English calendars by Alison Chapman, C.R. Cheney, David Cressy, and Ronald Hutton, this section of the book synthesizes almanacs, prayer books, Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (a calendrically organized guide to farming), and other popular printed works.²⁶ The goal here is to reconstruct the annual year as it was visually and textually experienced in the period by merging information concerning astrology, astronomy, agriculture, medicine, and commerce. Its sources are primarily printed books, but also continental engravings which, as Anthony Wells-Cole, Tara Hamling and others have shown, provided templates for domestic decoration, some of it concerning astrology, the seasons, or the labors of the months.²' There are few surviving examples of calendar imagery from material objects in late medieval or early modern England, but some are gathered here, including images from stained glass windows, misericords, needlepoint, and the Four Seasons tapestries at Hatfield House. The final section of Part III is a series of sample calendars from January to December, given in roughly chronological order, with January taken from a c. 1518 edition of the Kalender of Shepherds, and December from a 1640 John Booker almanac.²⁸ This overview provides readers with a sense of the graphic variations in early modern calendars over time.

Part III of Astrology, Almanacs, the Early Modern English Calendar, then, attempts to draw attention to the time reckoning material of the astrological almanac by showing how it articulated a coherent understanding of the annual year. Again, efforts have been made to reduce the ponderous pronouncement of the pedestrian (the weather is miserable in February, and people get colds!). Readers are warned that a love of doggerel (or at least sturdy tolerance) is essential for the study of calendars and almanacs. The primary goal of this section of the book is to provide a resource for scholars seeking the cultural associations—visual, literary, historical, and iconographical—that early moderns might have attached to a particular date, day of the week, month, or time of the year.

All three parts of Astrology, Almanacs, and the Early Modern English Calendar register the essentially utilitarian nature of the early modern printed almanac. Almanacs were extraordinarily popular largely because they were so extremely useful. The combination of usefulness and ubiquity put almanacs into a position in their culture that somewhat resembles the twenty-first century smart phone. Almanac owners could use these small pamphlets as devices with which to check the weather, verify holidays, ascertain the day of the week on a given date, self-diagnose medical complaints, gather tips on diet, look up dates in history, plot legal action, plan shopping excursions, find directions, keep track of expenses, and jog their memories about how many pints are in a gallon and gallons in a peck. That utility and ubiquity might have been one source of the widespread derision; as with smart phones, everyone complained about almanacs, everyone understood the fools they made of their owners, yet almost everyone (including the critics) owned one.

It is easy from a modern perspective to understand the usefulness of calendars, which are essentially utilitarian instruments. Astrology, at least the astrology of the almanacs, was equally practical. Yet despite its quotidian uses, the astrology of the almanacs had another advantage: it connected their owners to nature, the larger cosmos, and even (or so its compilers claimed) to the divine. It is possible the humble almanac was, in this way, an empowering artifact. An almanac provided a cheap but effective key to reading the book of nature as it was conceptualized in the Christianized Aristotelianism of late medieval and early modern England.²⁹ That cosmology posited a connected world, in which a merciful God embedded various clues to help human beings support the precarious life of the mortal body: to avoid treacherous weather, choose the safest times for medical treatment, eat wisely to support mental and physical health, travel safely by land or water, etc. Almanac compilers read the skies in order to interpret the connections between the mutable sublunar world and the immutable supralunar spheres of the stars and planets, and God’s intentions as expressed in astral signs. They then translated that information into easily understood guides for daily life. This information gave ordinary people tools with which to interpret nature, which could be used to keep themselves safe (and well-organized). The almanac was humble, but it was also ambitious; its modest subject was, as Capp puts it, “the whole of Creation”³⁰ In this way, almanacs connected the ordinary workaday world with the cosmos, as well as with the more specific social, economic, philosophical, medical, and religious information contained within its pages.

Astrology, Almanacs, the Early Modern English Calendar invites its readers to reap the benefits of this wealth of information, even if it means becoming—as this book’s author certainly has—likeSordido in Ben Jonson’s The Comicall Satyre of Every Man Out of his Humor (1600), “A Wretched Hobnail’d Chuffe, Whose Recreation, Is Reading of Almanacks" (A2r). Jonson may have mocked almanacs, but like Thomas Middleton—who made fun of them onstage in No Wit No Help Like a Womans (first published in 1657), and even more extensively in The Owles Almanac (1618)—chances are he also owned one. Fundamentally utilitarian in their own time, almanacs can be equally useful for scholars today who seek to understand the mentality of those ordinary (though literate) people in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, who purchased early modern astrological almanacs and used their calendars to guide them through the days, weeks, months, and seasons of the early modern annual year.

Notes

• 1 General work on calendars includes E. G. Richards, Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992); David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Arno Boorst, The Ordering of Time: From the Ancient Computus to the Modern Computer, trans. Andrew Winnard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). On the Jewish calendar see Elisheva Carlebach, Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
• 2 Faith Wallis, “Medicine in Medieval Calendar Manuscripts,” in Manuscript Sources of Medieval Medicine, ed. Margaret R. Schleissner (New York: Garland Publishing), 105-143, esp. 109.
• 3 Indispensable book-length works on early modern English calendars are C.R. Cheney, Handbook of Dates for Students of English History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). On the impact of the Reformation on the English calendar see especially Alison Chapman, “Now and Then: Sequencing the Sacred in Two Protestant Calendars,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33, no. 1 (2003): 91-123; Alison A. Chapman, “The Politics of Time in Edmund Spenser’s English Calendar,” Studies in English Literature 42, no. 1 (2002): 1-24.
• 4 The term “almanac” is used throughout this book as a shorthand to refer to the standard, combined almanac and prognostication that emerged in mid sixteenth century England. A fuller account of the history of the genre, and the relationship between the almanac and prognostication portions of these publications, is provided in Chapter 1.3, “Almanacs,” and Part II, “How to Read an Early Modern Almanac,” below.
• 5 Bernard Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs, 1S00-1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 13.
• 6 Alison Chapman, “Marking Time: Astrology, Almanacs, and English Protestantism,” Renaissance Quarterly 60, no. 4 (2007): 1257-1290; Katherine Walker, “’Daring to Pry into the Privy Chamber of Heaven’: Early Modern Mock-Almanacs and the Virtues of Ignorance,” Studies in Philology 115, no. 1 (2018): 129-153; Katherine Walker, “Early Modern Almanacs and the Witch of Edmonton,” Early Modern Literary Studies 18 (2015): 1-25; Adam Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Adam Smyth, “Almanacs and Ideas of Popularity,” in The Elizabethan

Top Ten: Defining Popularity in Early Modern England, eds. Adam Keyson and Emma Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 125-133; Louise Curth, English Almanacs, Astrology, and Popular Medicine (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).

Smyth, "Almanacs and Ideas of Popularity,” 127. See also Carroll Camden, “Elizabethan Almanacs and Prognostications,” The Library 12 (1931), 83-108, especially 100-108; Capp, Astrology, 231-235.

John Marston, Jacke Drums Entertainment, in The Plays of John Marston in Three Volumes, Volume Three, ed. H. Harvey Wood (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1939), 1189.

Thomas Bodley, Letters to Thomas James, Keeper of Bodleian Library (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), 222.

In A Countercuffe given to Martin lunior the author (possibly Thomas Nashe) claims he is writing “a very famous worke, Entitled, THE OWLES ALMA-NACKE” (London, 1589, A2v) but no such publication in the Marprelate series has survived. The Poor Robin series had it both ways, providing standard calendrical information that made it a usable almanac, while simultaneously making fun of the genre. On the substantive and sustained attacks in works against astrology, see Chapters 4 and 5, below.

Some perpetual almanacs are digitized, such as some editions of the Kalen-der of Shepherds and Leonard Digges perpetual almanac, first published as A Prognostication of Right Good Effect (1555). Among the annual almanacs, however, only three are listed on EEBO as having full-text availability (all fragments).

“About EEBO and the Text Creation Partnership,” eebo.chadwyck.com).

This very rough number counts the separate editions in Alfred W. Pollard and G.R. Redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Wales (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976-1991), hereafter cited as Pollard & Redgrave. The count includes only the annual almanacs and prognostications (not multi-year or perpetual almanacs). On that distinction, see Chapman, “Marking Time,” 1269-1270, and Chapter 3, “Almanacs,” below.

Capp, Astrology, 347-386; Eustace F. Bosanquet, English Printed Almanacs ana Prognostications: A Bibliographical History to the Year 1600 (London: Chiswick Press, 1917); Bosanquet, “Notes on Further Addenda to English Printed Almanacks and Prognostications to 1600,” The Library, 4th series, 18 (1937): 39-66.

Chapman, “Marking Time,” 1259.

See, for example, Lauren Kassell, “Almanacs and Prognostications,” in The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume I, Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, ed. Joad Raymond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 431-442; in the same volume, Simon Schaffer, “Science,” 308-416; R. C. Simmons, “ABCs, Almanacs, Ballads, Chapbooks, Popular Piety and Textbooks,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 3, 1400-1557, eds. Lotte Hellinga and J.B. Trapp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 504-513; Mary Erler, “The Laity,” in A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain, 1476-1558, eds. Vincent Gillespie and Susan Powell (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), 134-149.

Anthony Grafton and William Newman, Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 5. Lynn Thorndike does consider astrology throughout his magisterial eightvolume A History of Magic & Experimental Science (New York: MacMillan, 1923-1958).

• 18 Glyn Parry, The Arch-Conjuror of England: John Dee (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011); Lauren Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman: Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005); Steven Vanden Broecke, The Limits of Influence: Pico, Louvaine, and the Crisis of Renaissance Astrology (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Brian Copenhaver, "Astrology and Magic,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, eds. C.B. Schmitt et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 264-300; H. Darrel Rutkin, “Astrology,” The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 3, Early Modern Science, eds. Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 541-561; Mark Dawson, “Astrology and Human Variation in Early Modern England,” The Historical Journal 56, no. 1 (2013): 31-53; Brendan Dooley, ed., A Companion to Astrology in the Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Anthony Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). See also Eugenio Garin, Astrology in the Renaissance: The Zodiac of Life, trans. Carolyn Jackson and June Allen (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983); Robert S. Westman, The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); and Ann Geneva, Astrology and the Seventeenth Century Mind: William Lilly and the Language of the Stars (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). See more recently H. Darrel Rutkin, Sapientia Astrologica: Astrology, Magic and Natural Knowledge, ca. 1250-1800 (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019).
• 19 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner, 1971); Carroll Camden, “Astrology in Shakespeare’s Day,” Isis 19 (1933): 26-73; Camden, “Elizabethan Astrological Medicine,” Annals of Medical History 2 (1930): 217-226; Don Cameron Allen, The Star-Crossed Renaissance: The Quarrel about Astrology and its Influence in England (Durham: Duke University Press, 1941), 147-189; J. C. Eade, The Forgotten Sky: Astrology in English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Moriz Sondheim, “Shakespeare and the Astrology of his Time,” Journal of the Warburg Institute 2, no. 3 (1939): 243-259; and Johnstone Parr, Tamburlaine’s Malady and Other Essays on Astrology in Elizabethan Drama (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1953). See also William Wilson, Shakespeare and Astrology: From a Student’s Point of View (Boston, MA: Occult Publishing Company, 1903); Parr, “Edmund’s Nativity in King Lear,” The Shakespeare Association Bulletin 21 (1946): 181-185; Harry Rusche, “Edmund’s Conception and Nativity in King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly 20, no. 2 (1969): 161-164.
• 20 Robin B. Barnes, Astrology and Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 10.
• 21 See Brian Copenhaver’s useful overview of the issues concerning the differentiation, “Astrology and Magic,” passim.
• 22 Parry, Arch-Conjurer, 10.
• 23 For example, Gloucester’s repetition of the language of a typical early modern almanac prognostication in King Lear has been glossed as evidence of his “superstitious belief in the role of heavenly bodies as augurs of misfortune” (Greenblatt, Norton Shakespeare, 2353n), and as evidence that “(ejclipses were represented by superstitious men like Gloucester as auguries of evil,” The Tragedy of King Lear, ed. Jay Halio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 116n. On this issue see Phebe Jensen, “Causes in Nature: Popular Astrology in King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly 69, no. 4 (2018): 205-227.
• 24 On that distinction see H. Darrell Rutkin, “Understanding the History of Astrology (and Magic) Accurately: Methodological Reflections on Terminology and Anachronism,” Philosophical Readings 7, no. 1 (2015): 42-54; and Chapter 1.1, “Astrology,” below.

• 25 From a large and growing literature considering early modern books as interactional objects see Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Jennifer Anderson and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Adam Smyth, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); and the essays collected in “The Renaissance Collage: Toward a New History of Reading”, eds. Juliet Fleming, William H. Sherman, and Adam Smyth, a special edition of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45, n. 3 (2015).
• 26 See above, n. 6.

T7 Anthony Wells-Cole, Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Influence of Continental Prints, 1558-162S (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Tara Hamling, Decorating the Godly Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

• 28 Following Martha W. Driver, the title for the Kalender of Shepherds—the popular miscellany and perpetual almanac printed with multiple titles and texts from the late fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries—is here and throughout standardized to Kalender of Shepherds, and shortened to Kalender in parenthetical citations. Driver, “When is a Miscellany Not Miscellaneous? Making Sense of the ‘Kalender of Shepherds.’ The Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003): 199-214.
• 29 On the Aristotelian account of the book of nature, the appeal of that cosmology, and its complex displacement with the advent of the new science, see Lawrence Principe, The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), and Mary Thomas Crane, Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).
• 30 Capp, Astrology, 13.