This book offers an account of the astrological controversies in Renaissance Italy in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. These debates are often believed to have inspired further reassessment of the status of astrology, a discipline that attracted widespread fascination in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.1 Yet the texts that form the basis for these debates have not received the attention they deserve. This study argues that in the Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem, the Italian philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola questioned the compatibility of astrology with religion and philosophy, on the one hand, and with astronomy as astrology’s theoretical basis, on the other. Without going into reforming astronomy or modifying obsolete mathematical calculations, Pico proposed radically new ideas about whether astrology could be regarded as a legitimate discipline. By providing a thorough analysis of the treatise, this book provides some new answers concerning the role of astrology in Pico’s thought. This is a delicate problem that has not been satisfactorily solved in previous modern scholarship. Pico seems to endorse astrology in some of the earlier writings, whilst in the Disputationes, he firmly rejects its validity. Modern scholars have been trying to explain this as the result of an evolution in Pico’s thought; however, as this book will demonstrate, this does not sufficiently explain what Pico tried to achieve in the Disputationes. By adopting a new approach, which includes a close reading of the text and compares it with Pico’s earlier writings, I shall show that Pico’s method in the Disputationes is exactly the same as the one he develops in his De ente et uno, in which he tries to ‘purify’ the views of Plato and Aristotle from the interpretations of their successors. In Pico’s opinion, just as medieval philosophers had distorted Aristotle, the Neoplatonists had corrupted the views of Plato. By focusing on the method Pico applied in the Disputationes, my research underlines the continuity rather than the rupture in Pico’s thought. It also suggests that Pico was particularly preoccupied with trying to bring some order to a tradition that had become corrupted over centuries of misinterpretation. Another important goal of this book is to show Pico’s natural philosophical arguments against astrology. I argue that in proving that astrology has no natural philosophical grounds, probably under the influence of Iamblichus’ De mysteriis Aegyptiorum and Marsilio Ficino’s commentary on Iamblichus’ treatise, Pico proposes a compromise between the Platonic and Aristotelian theories of celestial light.
This book also provides, for the first time, a comprehensive study of the immediate reception of Pico’s Disputationes. I demonstrate that Girolamo Savonarola and Giovanni Pico’s nephew, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, both close to Giovanni Pico at the late stage of his career, drew upon Pico’s attack on astrology to develop their own interpretations of astrology. I also establish that Giovanni Pico’s ideas received support well beyond Italy. Thus, Maximus the Greek, an Orthodox monk—who in the late fifteenth century had become a novice of the Dominican order at San Marco in Florence and worked for some time for Gianfrancesco Pico—appropriated Savonarola’s and Giovanni Pico’s arguments in criticising astrology as a ‘Latin vice’ in the Epistles Against Astrology composed upon his arrival in Muscovy. Finally, my study explores how, at the same time, several scholars, such as Lucio Bellanti, Giovanni Pontano and Francesco Zorzi, opposed Giovanni Pico’s Disputationes in order to defend the positive value of astrology.
This book would have been very different without the advice, help and support of colleagues and friends that I was lucky to enjoy at every step of the way. First, I want to thank the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance and the University of Warwick for providing me with the funding for my doctoral studies. I would also like to thank Ingrid De Smet and Jayne Brown for their patience and support throughout all my years at Warwick. My special gratitude goes to my colleagues and friends at the University of Innsbruck and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies, in particular Martin Korenjak, William Barton, Dominik Berrens, Johanna Luggin, Irina Tautschnig and Stefan Zathammer, with whom I am privileged to share an interest in early modern science. I have presented much of the text that follows, at different stages of its development, at conferences and seminars at the University of Warwick, the University of Oxford, the Warburg Institute, the University of Toronto, the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, the RSA annual meetings and many other venues. I would like to thank those who attended my talks, commented on their content or suffered me as their co-panelist.
Throughout the course of my studies, I have enjoyed discussing Renaissance philosophy with colleagues from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds, all of whom have greatly contributed to the improvement of this book. I would like to thank, in particular, Michael Allen, Charles Burnett, Brian Copenhaver, Amos Edelheit, Marcello Garzaniti, Simon Gilson, Hiro Hirai, Dilwyn Knox, Jill Kraye, Thomas Leinkauf, Giovanni Licata, David Lines, Peter Marshall, Jozef Matula, John Monfasani, Tomas Nejeschleba, Marco Piana, Jacomien Prins, Sheila Rabin, Valery and Chris Rees, Denis Robichaud, Pasquale Terracciano, Dario Tessicini, Jane Tylus, Robert Westman and countless other kind souls. These discussions have helped me clarify and correct my positions, always to the great benefit of the study. I owe a great debt of gratitude to my patient friends, who are always ready to help me with everything I need. Maria Bogdanovskaya, Liya Chechik, Mikhail Gutnik, Alexander Iosad, Natalia Kolpakova, Oleg Rusakovskiy and Angelina Anna Volkoff, your support has been invaluable. I am truly grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, which helped my argument take its final shape, and to Han van Ruler for seeing the manuscript’s potential to fit into the Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History series.
If there is anything good in the chapters that follow, I owe it wholly to those who have taught me. Lidiya Braghina has introduced me to the incredible world of medieval and Renaissance intellectual history. My gratitude to Stéphane Toussaint, who awakened my interest in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino, knows no bounds. Maude Vanhaelen and Paul Botley have been the perfect supervisors and have saved me from countless mistakes. Any that remain are entirely my own.
Finally, I would like to thank my family. I would not be where I am without the people closest to me. My parents, Gayane and Levon, are always an inspiration; their attention to my intellectual development, their boundless curiosity, support and encouragement have all shaped me and my work. My wife, Maria, and my son, Petr, whom I love beyond all measure, are the most powerful motivation and the reason anything gets done.
The literature on the place of astrology in medieval and Renaissance Europe is immense. Often seen as inseparable from astronomy, astrology was taught at medieval universities as a practical application of theoretical calculations. Overall, despite clear reservations concerning its compatibility with Christian teachings, astrology was considered a respected field of knowledge, which received support across a wide spectrum of society. Jacob Burckhardt has already discussed the influence of occult knowledge on the formation of Renaissance culture: Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 323–44. On Giovanni Pico and astrological controversies in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, see ibid., p. 328. Amongst recent and significant studies on the topic, to mention but a few, see above all Jean-Patrice Boudet, Entre science et nigromance. Astrologie, divination et magie dans l’Occident médiéval (XII–XV siècle) (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2006); Monica Azzolini, The Duke and the Stars: Astrology and Politics in Renaissance Milan (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2013); Patrick Boner, Kepler’s Cosmological Synthesis: Astrology, Mechanism and the Soul (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2013). For debates on astrology in antiquity, see Tamsyn Barton, Ancient Astrology (London; New York: Routledge, 1994).