Astrology and the Sibyls: Paths to Truth in Medieval and Renaissance Europe

FAIN: FEL-281887-22

Laura Ackerman Smoller
University of Rochester (Rochester, NY 14627-0001)

Research and writing leading to a book on the relationship between astrology and prophecy in the European Middle Ages (from 1100 to 1600).

My project aims to unravel the complicated relationship between astrology and prophecy from ca. 1100 to 1600. The study centers on a set of conversations in which the two were either conflated or carefully distinguished and in which the stakes in forecasting the future were particularly high. Those who deliberately merged natural and supernatural knowledge, I contend, helped give rise to the new attitudes about nature that marked the Scientific Revolution. Scholarship has long rested upon the assumption that astrology and prophecy were two very different ways of knowing the future, one based upon natural observations and the other derived from supernatural inspiration. Examination of those who instead blurred the lines between the two, I argue, has much to teach us about the place of the religious and the non-rational in the construction of modern rational and scientific discourse, as well as the myriad and complex ways that people in the past negotiated their way to discovering truth.