Controversies
As the eight volumes of Lynn Thorndike’s History of Magic and Experimental Science attest, astrology was the subject of a vast literature from the classical period into the seventeenth century. Natural philosophers, physicians, academics, and in the Christian era, ecclesiasts of all stripes attacked, defended, refined, qualified, augmented, and attempted to curtail the art from the classical period through the early Christian era and into the middle ages, both before the réintroduction of Ptolemaic astronomy and its Arabic accretions into the West, and after. In the sixteenth century, astrology was generally accepted as academic practice; it was also, as Robin B. Barnes has shown, embraced by Lutheran Reformers as perfectly compatible with the Gospel.18 The mild paradox here is that, while intermittent religious objections to the art arose in England in the hundred years spanning the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, they did nothing to hamper the spread of astrological literacy and interest. That paradox can be partially illuminated by considering the attacks on astrology in the more precise cultural and scientific contexts in which they were produced.
As Don Cameron Allen has shown, the arguments of both attacks and defenses of astrology invariably draw on a long tradition. The most important source for attacks on the art was Pico della Mirandola’s massive late fifteenth century Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem, portions of which was published posthumously in 1495.19 This magnum opus gathered together centuries of objections to astrology, and added new ones. It was a central resource for all later astrological critiques, and most English attacks borrow heavily from it. But the critique of astrology in England is also connected to the rise of the astrological almanac and prognostication, and in the Elizabethan period, more specifically to the almanacs of Notradamus (in the late 1550s and 1560s), and the hullabaloo surrounding the great conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in 1583.
The first dedicated anti-astrology work printed in English in the Tudor period was William Fulke’s 1560 Antiprognosticon...an Invective against the Vayne and Unprofitable Predictions of Nostradame, etc. The Latin version of this work (published the same year) adds to the title page the English compilers who were deemed to offend almost as much as Nostradamus: William Cuningham, Henry Low, Thomas Hill, and Lewes Vaughan.
Fulke’s work, perhaps the most extreme criticism of astrology printed in the Tudor period, attacks astrology mainly on scientific grounds. He repeats the argument, also found in Pico’s Disputationes, that astrology cannot be called a science because its precepts cannot be proven; in this, it differs from other true sciences, such as geometry. He reiterates the assertion that astrological rules are arbitrary: the qualities of planets and signs depend entirely on fanciful and fictional stories, made up by men. There is no objective reason to believe that Jupiter is benevolent, or Saturn earthy, or that a triune aspect means anything different than an opposition or a quadrature. Fulke takes aim at Nostradamus for his “darke wrynkles of obscuritie, that no man could pyke out of them, either sence or understanding certain” (A8r-v). Cuningham he acknowledges to be “a man... bothe lerned and honest,” before attacking him as incompetent (Blr). Fulke grants, following Aristotle, that the stars influence the sublunar world, but denies that influence can be specifically applied to individuals (also a point made by Pico).
Although Fulke would later become known as a passionate Godly reformer, the grounds on which he attacks astrology are not those of other religious writers such as Miles Coverdale and Roger Hutchinson.20 Those writers echo St. Augustine’s claim that astrology abrogates Christian free will—a claim that, as Chapter 1 has shown, does not reflect the actual practice of Ptolemaic astrology in the Christian West.21 Fulke, however, acknowledges that astral influence does not compel the will; the stars only create “a certaine inclination” that may “by divers meanes be averted or tourned to some other effect” (B8v). Moral arguments in the Antiprognos-ticon mostly concern the irresponsible effects of prognostications, as with farmers who store grain against a prophesied dearth. And though Fulke’s attack is severe, it is not clear that he was a lifelong opponent to astrology, or even how fully serious he was in 1560. The title page of the Latin edition of the Antiprognosticon carries the same motto found on almanacs, Sapiens dominabitur Astris and Richard Bauckam posits that the Antiprognosticon might have been more a youthful rhetorical exercise than a serious attack.22 Fulke’s later works—including an astrological game designed to teach its players the very principles of the art he attacks as contrived in the Antiprognosticon—suggest a “less unambiguous attitude to astrology than that expressed” in this 1560 pamphlet.23
The next year, 1561, Francis Coxe was involved in two attacks on astrology. The first appeared in a broadside, The unfained retraction ofFraunces Cox, in which Coxe renounced necromancy, the conjuring of spirits, and “that curious part of Astrologie, wherein is contayned the Calculatying of Nativities.” In the second, A Short Treatise Declaring the Detestable Wick-ednesse of Magicall Sciences, Coxe more extensively denounced the art, insisting that even academic astrology was dangerous because “Never was there any that coulde yet holde hym selfe content with the simple knowledge of Astrologie: but wolde wade furder in those sciences of prediction” (A7v).
But Cox evidently found a way to practice true astrology without veering into necromancy, as he later compiled two almanacs (for 1567 and 1568).
The other attack on astrology printed in English in 1561 was John Calvin’s An Admonición against Astrology Judiciall, earlier published in Geneva in French in 1549. Though written over a decade earlier, the publication of this tract in English may have been provoked, as Fulke’s pamphlet was, by the notoriety of Nostradamus’ almanacs.24 Calvin’s position in this work is more nuanced than has sometimes been assumed, for the pamphlet defends “true astrologie” (A7v) as a subset of the “humaine sciences” (A5v). In addition to endorsing the basic principle that there is “a link or as it were a knott and tying together of the things which ear above with the things that are beneth,” Calvin provides a qualified endorsement of nativities, acknowledging that “the starres may empry-inte certain qualities in the persones,” though he stresses that they “can not cause that this thing or yt shuld fall upon them aftrwarde of other occassions” (B5r). That position is in fact in line with the stance of most Christian astrologers from St. Aquinas onwards. As did Fulke, Calvin objects to the art on the grounds of its inaccuracies, but the most significant attack is made (unsurprisingly) on religious grounds. The root problem with astrology for Calvin is that it distracts its adherents from a focus in the divine and undermines the faith that accepts the future without trying to predict it. Like all human learning the study of astrology can encourage “wicked curiositie” (E2r) that provokes meddling into secrets God has purposely hidden. Astrology’s focus on the physical influence of the stars also fails to give precedence to the spiritual; indeed, one of Calvin’s possibly original points in this pamphlet is that, if God calls men to be reborn in Christ, then their true spiritual nativity would cancel out the influence of the physical nativity.
Calvin’s rejection of astrology—though not always his precise arguments— are repeated in works by other English Protestant reformers, including Philip Stubbes and Reginald Scot. Yet, despite this opposition, it does not seem to be the case that most Elizabethan Protestants were opposed to astrology. As Capp has shown, a significant minority of almanac compilers were ministers, and the great and rising popularity of the astrological almanac suggested its mainstream appeal. On an ideological level, English astrologers and at least some divines were well aware that astrology had a powerful Protestant advocate in the Lutheran disciple, Philip Melanchthon, by whose influence the study of astrology at the University of Wittenberg was flourishing in the mid-sixteenth century.
Calvin’s Admonición was the last direct criticism on astrology until the 1580s, though there was one other significant attack on almanac compilers: The Astronomers Game by Nicholas Allen (1569). This work is partially a parody of an almanac, which it visually echoes with charts, rubrication, and calendars formatted in the ordinary way. Like Fulke, Allen goes after specific compilers, targeting Buckminster, Securis, and Low, whose
Related publications and controversies 85 inadequacies are exposed when Allen lists their variable predictions for 1569 against each day. Allen’s letter “To the Reader” mocks the compilers directly, claiming their calculations “jarre as much as any three clockes in Englande, how dronken so ever the Sextons be” (*lr). But though The Astronomers Game attacks English almanacs, it spares astrology itself; the errors he discovers are “in the artificer, not in the Arte within hir boundes” (Mr).
The next significant flurry of works attacking astrology and almanacs appears to have been in part a response to the publicity surrounding the great conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in 1583. As Margaret Aston and Carroll Camden have shown, this was no ordinary astrological event; though Saturn and Jupiter meet in conjunction approximately every twenty years, only once every 960 years does that conjunction occur at an especially significant moment in the astrological year, at the “end of the watery trigon or triplicity of the signs of Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces, and at the beginning of the fiery trigon or triplicity of the signs of Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius.”26 The conjunction’s importance was magnified by the fact that it was to occur only five years before 1588, a year that Regiomontanus and other astrologers (and some divines) had long predicted would mark the end of the world. Small wonder it excited alarm and intense interest from academics, ecclesiastical officials, and ordinary Elizabethans.
Though astronomers working in academic circles had long anticipated the great conjunction of 1583, it entered into English popular print only in January 1583 when Richard Harvey, a younger brother of Gabriel, first published An Astrological Discourse upon the Great and Notable Conjunction of the Two Superiour Planets, Saturne & Jupiter. Richard Harvey’s work includes a long preface dedicated to John Aylmer, the Bishop of London, that is essentially an extended defense of astrology in academic terms—the first in the English vernacular outside the more limited defenses offered in almanac letters to the reader. Like other Christian defenders of astrology Harvey cites biblical passages, classical authorities, and divines, including Philip Melanch-thon. The preface is followed by an extended prognostication in which Harvey walks his readers through his analysis of the charts for the conjunction itself, as well as charts for significant subsequent astronomical events, including several eclipses in the 1580s. This prognostication represents a greatly extended example of what one finds in the contemporary annual almanacs, though its tone is especially dire. Its connection with the annual prognostications is suggested in the title, which advertises that its goal is partly “to supplie that is wanting in comon Prognostications.”
The most important aspect of Harvey’s Astrological Discourse was its extraordinary popularity: it was printed five separate times in 1583. Perhaps to ride this tide of interest, another astrologer, Robert Tanner, almost immediately (also in 1583) released a different assessment of the great conjunction’s impact, in A Prognosticall judgement of the great conjunction.
Yet it was the response to Harvey by Thomas Heth (or Heath), published in March 1583, that created the greatest controversy. In A manifest and apparent confutation Heth attacked Harvey for having identified the wrong date and time for the conjunction—a fundamental error that (of course) would completely undermine the prognostication. Soon John Harvey—the youngest of the three Harvey brothers—supported his brother in print with An Astrologicall Addition (also 1583), which provides detail to shore up Richard Harvey’s original prognostication.
In the context of this controversy two important attacks on astrology appeared: Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton’s A Defensative against the Poyson of Supposed Prophecies. (1583, reprinted 1622) and William Perkins’ Foure Great Lyers (1584). Howard’s book—over three hundred pages in quarto—was (as Allen notes) “little more than an English summary” of Pico’s Disputationes.77 Among other things, Howard’ repeats Pico by denying that astrology can qualify as a science, and notes the arbitrary assignation of qualities and properties to the Zodiac signs and planets. Howard’s Defensative goes after “blinde almanacks” (1622, Hr), though these were only one small part of a larger attack on all astrological divination. Perkins’ Foure Great Lyers, however, takes direct aim at the annual almanacs by repeating the strategy of The Astronomers Game. He humiliates compilers by listing the weather forecasts as they were predicted for every day in the year (probably for 1585) by “B.,” “F.,” and “T.,” possibly Buckminster, Frende, and Thomas Twyne, a Cambridge academic who published a single sheet almanac in 1579 and an octavo almanac for 1585 (neither extant except in a few fragments). The second half of Perkins’ pamphlet articulated its goal in its title: “A resolution to the Countrye-man, provyng it unlawful! for him to bye or use our yearly Prognostications” (Blr). The problems concerning astrology for Perkins were the ineptitude of practitioners, the impossibility of charting the stars with accuracy (a point wholly supported by the Harvey-Heth disagreement), and the familiar argument that astrology bore no resemblance to other verifiable sciences. The moral and religious arguments are in the same vein as Calvin’s Admonición: an obsession with the stars distracts from the contemplation of the maker of those stars. Like most of astrology’s detractors, Perkins has no quarrel with basic Ptolemaic astrology; he endorses the idea that the stars influence the material sublunar world, and so can be useful in husbandry, physic, and forecasting the weather.
It has sometimes been suggested that the failure of the 1583 predictions to materialize, coupled by Heth’s attack on Harvey’s calculations and the appearance of the Howard and Perkins tracts, damaged the credibility of the astrologers and contemporary confidence in astrology. This may be true to a certain extent, but it also seems that the animosity was mostly ad hominem, damning the Harveys but not necessarily damaging the reputation of astrology itself. Heth thinks little of Richard Harvey’s skill—he calls him an “unskilfull Astronomer”—but he also pleads with readers not
Related publications and controversies 87 to let Richard Harvey’s inaccuracies discredit astrology itself, asking “that no indifferent person will thinke the worse of so excellent a science, for that the students in the same profession, seeme to write the one directly contrary to the other” (A2v). Similarly, the account of the fracas in Ho-linshed attacks Richard Harvey when it describes the foolish credulity of the “common sort of people” who believed the predictions of “a certeine astrologicall discourse” (1587, 3.1356), but it also does not seek to undermine astrology. The popular writer Robert Greene joined the fray to attack the Harveys in print in support of his friend Thomas Nashe, in a pamphlet war that was to extend into the 1590s. But in 1585, Greene also published Planetomachia, a work that both implicitly endorses astrology and explicitly defends it, inserting a Latin excerpt of Giovanni Pontano’s defense of astrology against Pico—a text that, in this context, might be seen as a swipe against the Pico arguments plagiarized in Howard’s Defensative.2^ In conclusion, although the 1583 predictions may have discredited the Harveys, and they certainly put wind in the sails of anti-astrology writers, they simultaneously showcased the art of the prognostication, casting it in a scholarly light in Richard Harvey’s preface and indeed in the other 1583 prognostications authored by Tanner, Heth, and John Harvey. As Aston notes, “[a]s the result of all this publicity, perhaps many people who would not normally have bothered much with such things were made conversant with astrological terminology.”29 Certainly, if one tracks the publication of almanacs, it seems that in the 1580s, their numbers begin to rise, en route to the explosion in the genre that would occur in the first decade of the seventeenth century.
Most defenses of astrology in the Elizabethan period appear in the almanacs themselves; these are reviewed in Part II. Yet, the Tudor era ends with both a significant attack and an extensive academic defense of astrology which, together, usefully encapsulate many of the major arguments for and against the art. The attack came from John Chamber, an Oxford fellow, in A Treatise against Judical Astrologie (1601). Succinct, witty, and rhetorically lively, the Treatise rehashes many of the previous arguments mounted against astrology from St. Augustine to Pico della Mirandola to Calvin, covering the art’s imprecision, its prohibition by the Bible, the moral and religious problems raised by telling the fortunes of Christian men, and the dubious scientific credibility of an art which had no way of validating its claims. Unlike Calvin, however, Chamber is well versed in astrology; his book is all the more devastating, as he limits his attack to issues that were undeniably reflected in the contemporary practice of Ptolemaic astrology. Yet, this argument was answered, point by point, and with three or four times the number of authorities marshalled at each laborious stage in Sir Christopher Heydon’s A Defence of Judiciall Astrologie (1603). As Allen has noted, the concise and direct Chamber was met with his rhetorical opposite in the methodical, detailed, ponderous Heydon, who in responding to A Treatise produced a book four times the length of its target. Chamberwrote a manuscript rejoinder to Heydon which was never published, but the Chamber position was championed by the ecclesiast George Carleton, published twenty years later (in 1624) as Astrologomania. Carleton’s work takes a radical position against astrology. Reiterating one of Augustine’s claims, he insists that astrology is magic, not science, and goes further than Fulke, Calvin, Perkins, and Chambers himself in order to deny that the stars are natural causes in the sublunar world—a claim that goes to the bedrock assumptions of the art. Carleton’s extreme position may well have found favor in religious circles, and some of his arguments reappear in the 1650s.
The Chamber-Heydon print debate usefully articulates the most academic claims for and against astrology at the end of the Elizabethan reign. Though to a modern reader the position of Chamber (and later Carleton) seems the reasonable one, in fact, Chamber’s attack was printed on the cusp of an explosion of the art that Heydon’s Defence supported, as the astrological almanac was poised to become one of the most popular books of the seventeenth century.
John Melton’s Astrologaster, or The Figure-Caster (1620) is usually categorized with anti-astrology works such as Carleton’s Astrolomania. It does indeed attack astrologers, but it does so with a tone, literary panache, and satirical verve that associates it equally with the genre of the mock almanac (considered below). As with Thomas Middleton’s The Ow-les Almanac, Astrologaster could be classified as a work of urban comedy, as suggested by a satirical “Table Made by the Learned Astronomer Erra Pater” that lines up the London trades with planets and the stars: Scriveners, for example, are Children of Mars and so ruled by Sagittarius, while “Tobacco men” are children of Venus, under the sway of Taurus (11-12). Melton’s target is primarily astrological practitioners; he provides lively scenes of crowds consulting the astrologers who by this time were a regular feature of London life, directing his spleen especially against “the ever-moving tongues” of women (4). He is particularly disturbed by the use of horary questions in elections—the central practice of professional astrologers, not almanac compilers. Astrologaster, which is not a particularly serious or scholarly attack on the art, is also the last surviving work dedicated specifically to undermining astrology printed in English until the 1650s.
