ALBERT S. COOK, EDITOR LX THE MEDIEVAL ATTITUDE TOWARD ASTROLOGY PARTICULARLY IN ENGLAND BY THEODORE OTTO WEDEL A Dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School PREFACE Medieval astrology has long suffered a neglect which, judged intrinsically, it deserves. Little more than a romantic interest now attaches to a complex divinatory art that for centuries has been looked upon as one of the aberrations of the human mind. When viewed historically, however, astrology is seen to have occupied a place in art and philosophy which many a later science might envy, and which, consequently, it is not well to ignore. Ancient astrology, indeed, has already received in recent years close and appreciative study. The poem of Manilius has never lost its appeal for the classicist; and the prominence of astrological thought in ancient philosophy and ethics has frequently aroused the curiosity of scholars. A history of mediæval astrology, on the other hand, still remains to be written. Yet for the men of the thirteenth century, even more than for the poets and philosophers of Greece and Rome, the rule of the stars over human destinies was an indisputable fact, entering into their every conception of the universe. In that sudden revival of Aristotelian and Arabian learning which, in the twelfth century, heralded the scholastic age, astrology was hailed as the chief of the sciences. Although a long warfare with theology had to precede its acceptance by medieval orthodoxy, its final triumph was complete. Theologians dared to credit the stars with a power second only to that of God himself. When Chaucer, in lines echoing Dante's Inferno, exclaims O influences of thise hevenes hye! Soth is, that, under God, ye ben our hierdes, he is expressing the conviction of the best mediæval thinkers. Astrology, offering, as it did, a reasoned explana |