Albert the great's speculum astronomiae

How Albert the Great's Speculum astronomiae was Interpreted and Used by Four Centuries of Readers: A Study in Late Medieval Medicine, Astronomy, and Astrology (review) Charles Burnett

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, Volume 7, Number 2, Winter 2012, pp. 220-222 (Article) Published by University of Pennsylvania Press DOI: 10.1353/mrw.2012.0024

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mrw/summary/v007/7.2.burnett.html

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Hayes’s DVD. Beautifully shot and edited, the film is entirely composed of the firsthand accounts of Ma˜e Nazare´ and a number of other informants. At one point, both Nazare´ and another priestess appear to be considering whether the entity herself, Maria Molambo, might agree to appear on camera. The other (more sedate) priestess seems doubtful. Indicating the awkward microphone wire attached to her dress, she shrugs and says, ‘‘It will be difficult for an orixa´ to accept these things, no?’’ But accept them she does: suddenly there is Maria Molambo in the body of Nazare´, evidently drunk as a skunk and smoking up a storm, directly addressing the camera, complaining about other fancy-pants priestesses, defending Ma˜e Nazare´ as a homespun truth-teller like herself. It’s a fascinating moment in the film, a little ethnographic mise en abyme in which the unspoken tensions of representation become apparent. Molambo articulates the same distrust of the ethnographer that she’s previously articulated toward Nazare´’s womanizing father and husband. In her discretion and understatement, Hayes refrains from the kind of self-reflexivity that recent ethnography—and particularly feminist ethnography—has frequently espoused. But in its quiet way, both this book and this film let Maria Molambo do the talking. barbara browning New York University

scott e. hendrix. How Albert the Great’s Speculum astronomiae was Interpreted and Used by Four Centuries of Readers: A Study in Late Medieval Medicine, Astronomy, and Astrology. Lewiston, Queenston, and Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2010. Pp. 326. The Speculum astronomiae (SA) is well known for being a critical catalogue of all the texts on astronomy, astrology, and related sciences, drawn up soon after the middle of the thirteenth century. Its differentiation between astronomy and astrology, and its definitions of astronomy (including cosmology) and the parts of astrology (introductions, revolutions of years, nativities, interrogations, and elections) are valuable for the historian of the science of the stars, and its distinction between three kinds of talismanic magic (‘‘necromancy,’’ a division of elections), on the grounds of the use of invocations, exotic alphabets, and the power of stars, is an essential text for the historian of magic. Hendrix’s book claims to be the first work to explore the contents of the SA. Hendrix sees the SA as arising out of the ‘‘intense controversy

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over the compatibility of astrology with Christian doctrine’’ and considers that ‘‘it rapidly assumed canonical status and set the terms of debate for the intellectuals of the fourteenth century and beyond.’’ This is what he tries to show in this book. Chapter 1 discusses the vexed question of the authorship of the SA. Chapter 2 deals with its position within thirteenth-century debates on astrology. Chapter 3 considers the place of the SA within Albertus’s thought. Chapter 4 analyzes the use of the work, as evidenced from the manuscripts. Chapter 5 focuses on the discussion of the validity of astrology in the premodern period, and Chapter 6 explores the reasons for its demise, but ends with the remarkable resurgence of interest in astrology in recent years, and the renewed use of the SA itself. Hendrix is not afraid to sail against the prevailing wind of modern scholarship. He attributes the decline of astrology to its association with popular uprisings. He is convinced about Albertus’s authorship and (rightly) considers that the recent debate, which has focused on the authorship, should move on. The principal object of Hendrix’s criticism is the conclusions of Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, who argues against the attribution of the work to Albertus Magnus on the grounds that the earliest manuscript does not carry this attribution. The strongest evidence for Albertus’s authorship brought by Hendrix is a quotation from Bonaventura of Iseo, a friend of Albertus’s, who mentions that the Pope had given Albertus the leave to examine the books of all the sciences to decide which were licit and which were illicit. Hendrix follows Richard Lemay in accepting this evidence as conclusive. After refuting Paravicini’s counterevidence for the authorship of Campanus of Novara, Hendrix gives the date of composition as between 1260 and 1270. Hendrix argues for Albertus’s authority also on the grounds of the similarity between the ideas expressed in the SA and those in other works of Albertus, such as his De fato. The arguments of Hendrix’s book would have been more compelling if the book had not been marred by a lot of errors in detail. Many of these seem to be the result merely of inadequate proofreading (p. 13, ‘‘Paravacini’’ for ‘‘Paravicini’’; p. 45, n. 139, ‘‘dilegendum’’ for ‘‘diligendum’’; n. 142, ‘‘iudicorum’’ for ‘‘iudiciorum’’; p. 47, ‘‘of it’’ repeated, etc.). More serious are the frequent errors in the descriptions of the manuscripts contained the SA, which form the main evidence for the thesis. These manuscripts had already been described in detail (and more accurately) in a work that the author does not appear to have used: Alberto Magno, Speculum astronomiae, eds. S. Caroti, M. Pereira, S. Zamponi, under the direction of P. Zambelli (Pisa, 1977). Knowledge of these descriptions would have saved Scott Hendrix from making several mistakes in his reading of the Latin in the manu-

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scripts, and would have provided identifications of many of the texts accompanying the SA: for example, the Arras manuscript that opens the list (pp. 221–22) includes Plato of Tivoli’s translation of the Quadripartitum of Ptolemy and Abu Ma‘shar’s book De magnis coniunctionibus (Hendrix does not recognize either of these works); Erfurt, Amploniana Q 348 (pp. 245–46) contains a ‘‘canonium simetrum magnitudine,’’ not a ‘‘canonem similem magnitudine’’ and Thabit ibn Qurra’s De motu accessionis et recessionis (an astronomical work), not his De imaginibus (on talismans), which Hendrix may have been led into believing merely because the text begins with ‘‘Imaginabor’’; Alcabitius did not write a commentary on the Quadripartitum of Ptolemy (p. 245); and the work referred to in Erfurt Q 348 is simply another copy of the frequently occurring Introduction to Astrology of Alcabitius. It is difficult to find one’s way round the manuscripts, which are grouped according to whether they were used by astrologers or doctors (an artificial dichotomy), but an order is not always preserved within each of these divisions (Munich, clm 27 comes after 227, BNF 7335 comes after BNF 7440). Hendrix relies on this analysis of the manuscripts in Chapter 4, where the dates of the manuscripts (which are often disputable) are meant to illustrate the development of the history of the reception of astrology, which is traced from the thirteenth century to the present day. In addition to the manuscript evidence, Hendrix brings in (in Chapter 5) the testimonies of authors (notably Pierre d’Ailly, Jean Gerson, and Pico della Mirandola) and shows how they referred to the book (invariably as a work of Albertus Magnus). There is a lot of useful material in this book, and compelling ideas, but one is left wishing for more academic rigor and care in presentation. charles burnett Warburg Institute

cathy gutierrez. Plato’s Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. 218. By turns fantastical and farcical, miraculous and morbid, the nineteenthcentury phenomenon of spiritualism has led numerous historians on the quest to pin down its phantoms. Many have followed the reigning fashion in studies of spiritualism, choosing to focus on a single theme or geographic territory within this frustratingly amorphous movement and research it exhaustively. Cathy Gutierrez’s recent contribution to the literature offers up a bolder, expansive vision that utilizes a history of ideas approach to chart the develop-

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