Astrologie und Öffentlichkeit im Mittelalter (review)

This is a curiously conceived book. In his introduction, Mentgen begins by noting the “shocking” lack of attention the topic of astrology has received especially among German medievalist (p. 1). He also notes that the practice of astrology faced two significant obstacles throughout the medieval period—it had suffered legal condemnations since late antiquity, and certain aspects of it contradicted the Christian doctrine of human free will. Yet this book deals not at all with the long and complex history of legal or intellectual opposition to astrology. Neither does it intend to provide a complete survey of the practice of this craft in medieval times. Instead, Mentgen focuses on the issue of the public reception of astrological predictions. He notes the difficulty of defining a “public” in medieval times, with a nod to Habermas (pp. 10–12), but offers no resolution to this dilemma, and afterward treats it unproblematically. On the subject of astrological “Öffentlichkeit,” Mentgen intends to be comprehensive, covering the entire medieval period and all of Europe, but in fact he radically narrows his focus to only two issues (the second, admittedly, quite large). The book makes absolutely no attempt to unify its two entirely separate topics, and so is, in fact, really two separate books.

The first “book” Mentgen has written concerns the propagation of the so-called Toledo letter in all its variations from its first appearance around 1185 to its final fading from importance after 1524. The second concerns the place of astrology in the courtly culture of the twelfth through early sixteenth centuries. The subject of the first “book,” the Toledo letter, is perhaps the most famous prophetic text of the later Middle Ages. It circulated extremely widely and appeared in numerous variants, reissued repeatedly over the course of several centuries. There is no question that it reached a large (by medieval standards) public, but what relates it to the practice of astrology? The initial letter and many of its later variants were supposedly authored by astrologers. Moreover, Mentgen notes that the initial context of the letter’s composition was a fearful astrological convergence in 1185 that promised to bring natural disasters in its wake. Many later variants of the letter were also connected with significant astrological convergences. Yet Mentgen’s analysis does not really focus on the astrological overtones that the letter, or its contexts, may convey. Instead, what emerges is a study of medieval prophecy, and as Mentgen admits, while many medieval prophetic texts had astrological components similar to those in the Toledo letter, many also did not. No attempt is made to analyze specifically astrological prophecy, or to contrast it to other variants of prophetic activity.

The second “book” is comprised mainly of a catalog-like survey of astrologers associated with various princely courts. Mentgen begins with a brief look at courtly astrologers in ancient Rome, Islam, Byzantium, and early medieval western Europe (each receives a few pages of treatment). He then narrows his focus to the later medieval West, and proceeds systematically with chapters on the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries (this last extending a bit into the early sixteenth). Each chapter is subdivided geographically, so readers are led on a tour through Europe. The deployment of sources covering such a wide area, both geographic and chronological, is impressive, but the analysis never goes very deep. Mentgen often does little more than name certain astrologers at various courts, provide their dates, and briefly describe their major activities. He makes little attempt to analyze how they were situated or operated within courtly cultures, as Jean-Patrice Boudet and Jan Veenstra, for example, have done in reference to specific courts in France and Burgundy. As for “public reception,” the existence of court astrologers seems enough evidence for Mentgen that they had a public; he makes no effort to discern how their predictions were received or utilized, or how this reception may have changed over time, as, for example, Hilary Carey has done for English court astrologers.

At the end...