History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The Christian Astrology of Pierre d'Ailly, 1350-1420 by Laura Ackerman Smoller (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 555 pressed in 1542) vis-à-vis its noble founders (the family Grandson) and the abbey's later patrons/advocates ofanother family (the La Sarraz). Particular contributions of this study are the author's clarification of the date of the foundation of the abbey and the uncovering of fourteenth-century tamperings with earlier documents in regard to the protective rights of the nobility in relationship to the abbey. The second part of the volume (pp. 201-301 of which pp. 265-299 are source texts) deals with the places ofburial ofthe La Sarraz family. This is a well researched study ofthe symbolic role ofdynastic burial places as expressions of familial continuity and the abiding relationship between members of the nobility and the religious communities they helped to found and protect and from whom they, in turn, expected immemorial prayer. This study provides photographs of the La Sarraz cenotaph which is one of the more fascinating examples oflate medieval funerary art (a recumbent figure being consumed by frogs and worms!). This work is particularly useful in providing all the archival sources used for the writing of the studies. The bibliography seems quite adequate and the index is thorough. This is a rather esoteric little work but one which gives considerable insight into some important dimensions of the social history of medieval religious and political life. This is the sort of research which provides the data for the more comprehensive sociological perspective exhibited in such works as Patricia Wittberg's The Rise and Fall ofCatholic Religious Orders. A Social Movement Perspective (State University of NewYork Press, 1994). Andrew D. Ciferni, O.Praem. Washington Theological Union History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The Christian Astrology of Pierre d'Ailly, 1350-1420. By Laura Ackerman Smoller. (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1994. Pp. xii, 233. $35.00.) With the contributions of such scholars as Ouy, Courtenay, Bernstein, Pascoe, Guenée, Kazmarek, Pluta, and Chappuis, fans of Pierre d'Ailly appear of late to be growing in number, and they have good reason to welcome this cogent, intriguing , and well-researched book, which packs a good deal of learning into surprisingly small compass. A faithful follower of the via moderna at the University of Paris, d'Ailly rose to prominence as one of the most distinguished theologians of his day, as chancellor of the university, reforming churchman, cardinal of the Pisan obedience, and a leading conciliarist spokesman at the Council of Constance, deeply involved in the successful efforts of that assembly to end the schism. Scholars have long known that he dabbled in astrology as well as wrote on astronomical, calendric, and geographical questions, but de- 556 BOOK REVIEWS spite his arresting choice of the year 1789 for the future arrival ofAntichrist, no previous scholar has accorded this aspect of his life and work the degree of painstaking attention extended to it by Smoller. In so doing, she constructs a persuasive portrait of a thinker who in his earlier years had shared both the widespread apocalyptic foreboding generated by the protracted schism and the antipathy toward the claims made for astrological divination long common among churchmen, but who in the last ten years of his life, as his hopes for a genuine reform of the Church waxed and his apocalypticism waned, turned to astrology as an analytical tool to help him confirm his sense that the coming ofAntichrist was not imminent. For by that time, and unlike such contemporaries as Nicole d'Oresme and Heinrich von Langenstein, he had come to view astrology as a rational science that would enable him to make sense of history and prophecy. This portrait is of interest for at least three reasons. First, and beyond the obvious appeal of the reassuringly modest estimate of the earth's circumference that d'Ailly gave in his Imago mundi, because it may help explain the further appeal to Christopher Columbus (who read and annotated them all) of the other tracts of d'Ailly's dealing with astrology which he found bound together with that geographical work. Second, because of what it tells us about the changing fortunes of astrology across the medieval centuries and the appeal it could hold even for intellectuals possessed...