Zukunftsvoraussagen in der Renaissance (review)

This book gives a broad panorama on work that is being done mainly in German universities (with one exception) concerning the theme of Renaissance prophesying. It corresponds to a recent resurgence of interest in these topics within Renaissance scholarship as a whole, which has embraced them as emblematic of several characteristic cultural traits. Breadth is expressed here in the geographical regions to which scholarship is applied as well as in the variety of themes. Concerning the first point, a North/South divide, at least in terms of the sheer production of texts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, may be in evidence, still awaiting confirmation via a better census of Southern European astrological publications including manuscripts, and Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer proposes that the papal bulls against astrology and polemics by Jesuits and others were effective discouragements in the South, while they had the opposite effect in the North. But astrology is not the only theme here, and a particularly valuable contribution of this volume is the effort to join the different areas of intellectual life in which prophesying took place — astrology as well as literature, politics as well as medicine. Of course these themes may often be interrelated, as Mahlmann-Bauer points out, studying the bull of Sixtus V contra astrolgiam iudiciariam, which was inseparable from the religious and political aspects. Nor is it possible to consider prognostication in Shakespeare's history plays without taking into account the political significance of a teleological view of the Wars of the Roses or the emergence of the Tudor dynasty, as Wolfgang G. Müller shows. The volume combines general treatments such as Wolfgang Hübner's pithy and challenging account of "Astrology in the Renaissance" and Walter Ludwig's overview of "Prophesying in ancient, early modern and modern times," with more specific monographic studies such as the ones already mentioned, as well as Klaus Bergdolt's and Heinz-Günther Nesselrath's concerning astrology, respectively, in Petrarch and Erasmus, and Stephan Heilen's and Sarah Slattery's concerning, respectively, the works of Lorenzo Bonincontri and Joseph Grünpeck.

What emerges with great forcefulness from these pages is that knowledge regarding future events and circumstances, acquired by forms of investigation often regarded as being scientific, or at least rational, was a far more important category of Renaissance thought than has hitherto been admitted. Not just because the famous critiques of astrology (here studied also by Hübner), on the grounds of the possible assault on freewill and the difficulty of incorporating new astronomical data into models of prediction, and so forth, were met by equally authoritative defenses, and in this connection it is interesting to compare the negative official Roman view to the much more favorable opinion of Protestant theologians such as Melanchthon (so says Volker Leppin). But to the extent that human history was seen as being inscribed within the larger life cycle of the cosmos, bounded by the Christian system of divine redemption and fulfillment of the scriptures, the potential for gaining insight into what might happen seemed real enough. And if, from a certain standpoint, the humanist view of history as a succession of unique events militated against any determinism (as Ulrich Muhlach points out), nonetheless, a deeply-rooted theism and generally accepted formulae, such as the succession of empires, for organizing human experience into a providential scheme, could easily be reified into a belief in repetitivity, or at least, in the existence of a pattern — and such procedures were by no means limited to the Catholic world, so Leppin argues, analyzing the Chronicon Carionis, replete with observations on the prospects for a society destined since the beginning (as demonstrated in part by a review of the Joachimite succession of papacies) to undergo the Lutheran reforms. Indeed, it was just in this period that the recovery of classical antiquity and a critical approach to Arab learning expanded existing methods of divination. The conjunction theory of al-Kindi...