Arts and Humanities Commons^™

'In So Many Ways Do The Planets Bear Witness': The Impact Of Copernicanism On Judicial Astrology At The English Court, 1543-1660, Justin Dohoney

All Theses

The traditional historiography of science from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries has broadly claimed that the Copernican revolution in astronomy irrevocably damaged the practice of judicial astrology. However, evidence to the contrary suggests that judicial astrology not only continued but actually expanded during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. During this time period, judicial astrologers accomplished this by appropriating contemporary science and mathematics. Copernicus's De revolutionibus, in particular, provided better mathematics for determining the positions of the planets than the prevailing Ptolemaic system and reformist astrologers interested in making astrology a precise, mathematical science embraced this new astronomy.
This …