Early Medieval Astronomy: the Moon, the Zodiac, Thunders and Dreams

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Из курса от партнера Universitat de Barcelona

Magic in the Middle Ages

701 оценки

Universitat de Barcelona

Magic in the Middle Ages

701 оценки

Magical thought has always attracted human imagination. In this course we will introduce you to the Middle Ages through a wide conception of magic. Students will have an approach to medieval culture, beliefs and practices from the perspective of History and History of Science. Popular magic, as well as learned magic (alchemy, geomancy and necromancy) will be addressed. Moreover, we will also deal with how eastern practices and texts influenced western culture. In July 2016, the course will contain a brand-new module devoted to astrology. Magic in the Middle Ages offers a captivating overview of medieval society and promotes reflection about certain stereotypes associated with this period. At the end of the course, the students: a) will have overcome the usual prejudices about the Middle Ages, b) will be able to analyze historical documentation from the Middle Ages and recognize the most common patterns of juridical documents regarding witchcraft, and c) will be capable of distinguishing between popular magic and the magic of the learned people; will have a notion of which spiritual practices were allowed in medieval Europe and which ones were related to the devil, and will be aware of the link between a cultural product and the society that produced it. This course is taught in English, although subtitles in English, Catalan and Spanish will also be provided. COURSE SYLLABUS Week 1. Introduction to medieval magic (Pau Castell). Week 2. Magic & Heresy (Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel). Week 3. From Magic to Witchcraft (Pau Castell). Week 4. Magic in Islam (Godefroid de Callataÿ and Sébastien Moureau). Week 5. Astrology & Geomancy (Theo Loinaz, Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel, Godefroid de Callataÿ and Blanca Villuendas). © Gemma Pellissa Prades (coord.), Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel and Joana Palau Mumany Magic in the Middle Ages by Gemma Pellissa Prades (coord.), Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel and Joana Palau Mumany is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Из урока

UNIT 5: ASTROLOGY & GEOMANCY

Medieval Astrology: Between Science and Magic5:57

The Melting Pot of Medieval Astrology6:10

Early Medieval Astronomy: the Moon, the Zodiac, Thunders and Dreams7:08

Horoscopes and World Events: the Doings of High-End Astrology6:37

Optional video-On World Cycles 1: The Great Year Doctrine in Antiquity (1)5:42

Optional video-On World Cycles 1: The Great Year Doctrine in Antiquity (2)7:14

Optional video-On World Cycles 2: The Great Year Doctrine in the Middle Ages (1)9:52

Optional video-On World Cycles 2: The Great Year Doctrine in the Middle Ages (2)6:35

Познакомьтесь с преподавателями

Godefroid de Callataÿ - University of Louvain
Professor
Oriental Institute (University of Louvain)
Dr Pau Castell Granados
Research and Teaching Scholar at University of Barcelona
Sébastien Moureau - University of Louvain
Chargé de recherches du F.R.S.-FNRS
Institut Orientaliste (CIOL)
Dr Gemma Pellissa Prades
Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of the Classics, Harvard
Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel
BSc, BA, MA
Dept. of Medieval History, Palaeography & Diplomatics, Institute for Research on Medieval Cultures, University of Barcelona
Blanca Villuendas
PhD Candidate
Instituto de Lenguas y Culturas del Mediterráneo y Oriente Próximo, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas

[MUSIC]

Hi, there!

Glad to know you're still with us.

The last video was pretty tough, wasn't it?

Let's see if we can get down to business with this one and give you a few specific

data about the different sources and practices that made up the astrological

corpus of the first centuries of the Middle Ages in Christian Europe.

Just for this once,

we won't be using the conventional periods you're all familiar with,

Early Middle Ages, Late Middle Ages, and so on.

We will start instead with a far simpler division into a pre-Islamic and

a post-Islamic period, understood as the periods before and

after the Islamic Golden Age that began with the ascent to

power of the Abbasid Dynasty in the 8th century.

This is not to say that we will focus exclusively on the Islamic context.

In fact, the Arabic-Islamic, scientific tradition was actually Graeco-Arabic,

and pre-Islamic astrology coexisted with successive Arabic-Latin contributions for

centuries.

But given that Islam was that the same time the receiving end

of the astrological legacy of antiquity, and one of the main means through which

said legacy was passed on to the West, using its expansion

as a dividing line between two distinct astrological periods, seems convenient.

In the pre-Islamic period it doesn't seem that

Western astrology owed much to the classical legacy of Late Antiquity.

Most of the astrological concepts produced by Graeco-Roman scholars

that made it to this period were vague, non-technical, and anomymous notions

usually mixed up with astronomical texts that were mostly concerned with cosmology.

Their focus was the explanation of the structure of the universe

through a model where the earth was at the center, and descriptions of planets and

zodiacal signs that were somewhere between science and poetry.

This kind of materials were preserved mostly in a sort of philological

primitive encyclopaedism whose main works were the <i>Saturnalia

and the Commentary on Cicero's <i>Dream of Scipio</i> by Macrobius in the late 4th century.

<i>De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii</i>, [On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury],

by Martianus Capella in the early 5th century.

The <i>Etymologies</i> and <i>De Natura Rerum</i>,

[On the Nature of Things], by Isidore of Seville in the 6th century.

And a century later, Bede's work, <i>De temporum ratione</i>,

On the Reckoning of Time.

This sort of philological astrology was accompanied by

several different versions of a Christian Zodiac

that interpreted the different signs as allegories of the Bible, thus replacing

the mythological interpretations that had prevailed until that moment.

The astrological purpose of these early medieval centuries was what

Isidore himself used to rebuke, describing it as <i>astrologia superstitiosa</i>,

superstitious astrology.

Divinatory astrology appeared in many miscellanies across Europe,

together with other predictive techniques.

As for astrological literature in Latin, it was represented, especially from

the 9th century onwards, mainly by two specific genres, <i>Lunaria</i> and Zodiologies.

On the one hand, the <i>Lunaria</i> were a series of texts that offered

basic information about the advisability of buying and

selling, embarking on a journey, having a phlebotomy performed, or

taking a remedy, depending on the position and phase of the moon.

For example, they contain statements such as

"the eighth moon is the most favorable time to sow the fields and move the bees."

On the other hand, zodiologies provided brief descriptions and

general predictions for the natives of each zodiacal sign.

"The woman born under the sign of the lion will be shy, ingenious and

spirited," for example.

These works were usually accompanied by brontologies,

predictions based on thunders.

"If it begins to thunder during the first hour of the night,

great mortality will ensue."

Texts on chiromancy, texts interpreting dreams as the renowned dreams of Daniel,

and calendar and meteorological predictions.

"If the calends of January fall on a Monday, the winter will be hard."

Despite their unsophisticated and almost folkloric appearance,

all this divinatory literature was a product of Latin scholarship

especially produced during the Carolingian Renaissance of the late 8th century on

the basis of late antique sources.

Their simple nature, and the lack of requirement of any technical skill,

made this kind of astrology quite popular, even beyond the monastic sphere.

And these texts were translated into vernacular languages from early on,

in particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world.

However, this Carolingian astrology had none of the most characteristic elements

of Western tradition such as horoscopes and the typical astrological jargon:

ascendant, aspect, triplicity, exaltation, combustion, houses.

All these terms and the concepts behind them belong to mathematical or

technical astrology originally practiced by Graeco-Roman <i>mathematici.

But the transmission of their knowledge to medieval Europe

was interrupted with the fall of Rome.

In fact, it was not really reintroduced and

reestablished in Latin Europe until the arrival of the translations of

Arabic texts that were carried out mainly between the 10th and the 12th centuries,

while the Greek translations of the same texts were also in circulation in

Byzantium from the beginning of the 11th century onwards.

In any case, this learned astrology, although crucial, did not

replace the poorer and more primitive tradition we have just described.

Both of them flourished together, for both of them met the needs and

interests of medieval society in their own different ways.

After all, it was precisely the fact that Merovingians and

Carolingians kept alive their curiosity about astrological doctrines what made

possible the search and translation of new texts that dealt with similar topics,

which by that time were necessarily written in Arabic.

In our next video,

we will address the evolution of this newborn medieval astrology, and

we'll witness the rebirth of technical astrology, which is, in a way, the birth

of horoscopes, one of the last pieces of the astrological puzzle of the Middle

Ages that has managed to survive until our extremely scientific 21st century.

Stay tuned.

[MUSIC]

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