Subtitle: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer
Speaking of divination: an intellectual biography of the 16th c. astronomer-etc. Girolamo Cardano; or rather an argument about how his intellectual biography should be construed. It isn't exactly my cup of tea, lacking as it does a particular positive virtue and skirting something I consider a positive flaw. I don't think I'm its audience either.
The positive virtue I would have liked is: more of Cardano himself. He wrote incessantly, his peers and competitors likewise, they wrote about themselves and each other as well as politics, astrology, astronomy, understanding reclaimed classical documents, dice-gambling, digestion... anything, in competition or mutual praise, as they moved from court to town and one specialty to another. It was the very ferment of the Renaissance! but Grafton refers to it and rarely quotes. Fair enough, he's writing for historians who are expected to look up what they don't know already. What remains is Grafton's arguments about - I simplify, I probably traduce - how Cardano's astrology should not be regarded as unscientific or un-modern, except when those traits are thought of as positive¹.
Flattening all intellectual endeavor into one category annoys me, especially if it's done by reasoning that seems no sharper than "these two things make us [me] feel the same, so they must in some way be the same". It's a very weak condition of sameness for the things. I would entertain, easily, an argument that Cardano's astrology was in his day indistinguishable from pursuits that are now obviously reliable. I would expect evidence, though, perhaps of engineers as blandly juggling their own data. Tycho Brahe is mentioned in comparison, but not in detail.
I'm not sure Grafton is really arguing Cardano's astrology was science, though. He might even be trying to hedge that claim so as to forestall people who would make it:
Many scholars nowadays use computers to write and fax machines to submit the conference papers in which they unmask all of modern science as a social product, a game like any other. Though they hold that the laws of fluid dynamics are only one way, no more valid than many others, of describing the motion of air over wings, they take airplane trips to participate in the self-congratulatory discussions that ensue. Compared to the sterile credulity of modern arts of analysis, Cardano's arts of prediction look bright, warm and solid enough to explain their appeal to the wide range of readers they attracted and informed.
I don't know if "sterile credulity" is the thrown gauntlet it would be in my daily round of discourse, because I haven't winkled out a clear statement of what Grafton thinks we shouldn't accept about Cardano's work.
For instance, an argument in support of Cardano's rigor is that he writes about mechanical marvels as well as astrological ones, and sometimes assumes that a marvel must have a mechanical explanation (p. 164). That could, it seems to me, also have come from engineering-envy on Cardano's part. Court marvels of hydraulics competed with astrologers for patronage. But I don't know if the engineers and scientists laid claim to knowing secrets that no rules could convey, thanks to a special, divine gift
, which is how the astrologers explained their failure to exactly follow what they called the rules of astrology (as well as their failures of prediction).
Grafton's book on the footnote in history describes historians as generally familiar with a collection of sources, so they can signal each other in a pattern of references and omitted references to the 'expected' texts, and given that I have little reason to believe that I know what he's really saying.
All told, I'd call it a good argument for Cardano's parity with , unfortunately weakened by a grudging expectation of attacks on scientific primacy. Better to have flown sublimely over science, and defended Cardano's humanism on humanistic grounds.
...Cardano's art of prediction made possible one of his most remarkable, and most creative, achievements as a writer. By concentrating less on the long-term movement of his career than on the forces which recurred throughout his life, he produced an autobiography which did not make the author's life fit the teleological narrative logic of an adventure or a conversion, but set out to isolate the permanent traits of his character.
And there springs, eventually, the novel, which should be enough glory for a writer; and the arts or sciences of the psyche, to boot.
ISBN: 0-674-09555-3
...Melanchthon also suggests that horoscopes were more than dry, technical data sets produced by mathematically skilled intellectuals to satisfy their curiosity. They were politically challenging documents, directed at powerful clients who were hard to satisfy...
Well, and so were ballistic and hydroengineering projects; who's injecting the opposition between "technical" and "political", between "curiosity" and satisfaction?
So wrote clew in History (16th c.). | TrackBack