Anthony Grafton: Cardano’s Cosmos: The World and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer

Cardano’s Cosmos: The World and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer by Anthony Grafton
Review by: rev. by Deborah E. Harkness
Isis, Vol. 96, No. 1 (March 2005), pp. 104-105
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
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104 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 96 : 1 (2005)
Enrico G. Rafaelli. L’oroscopo del mundo: Il
teme di nascita del mundo e del primo uomo se-
conda Pastrologla zoroastriana. 216 pp., bibl.,
index. Milan: Mimesis, 2001. €15.49 (paper).
The reconstruction of the astrology of Sasanian
Iran (ca. AD 224–652), which was originally de-
scribed in Pahlavı̄ texts that have now mostly
been lost, has been flourishing in the last few
decades. Earlier authors depended on fragments
of this science preserved in the post-Muslim con-
quest Pahlavı̄ texts, the Bundahishn (V, VA, VB,
and VIA) and the Wizı̄dagı̄hı̄ of Zādspram, and
in the Kārnāmag ı̄ Ardaxšı̄r ı̄ Pābagān and Zand
ı̄ Wahman Yasn of the Sasanian period. The rele-
vant sources were considerably expanded as it
was realized, on the basis of Arabic astrological
texts and their Greek and Latin translations, that
Sasanian astrology was based on a fusion of
Greek and Sanskrit science. Since its Pahlavı̄
roots are necessary for understanding much of
Medieval and Renaissance European astrology,
they should be more carefully studied by those
who write books and articles on the history and
influence of astrology in the West.
The horoscope of Gayōmard in the Bunda-
hishn was published first by E. Blochet (“Texts
Pehlvis inédits relatifs à la religion mazdéenne,”
Revue de l’histoire des religions, 1895, 32:99–
115 and 217–241, esp. pp. 110–115 and 217–
220). The subsequent history of its interpretation
is reviewed by Raffaelli (pp. 60–66). Eventu-
ally, it was shown to contain a mixture of Greek,
Indian, and Iranian ideas, and to have been cast
in the sixth century, most probably during the
reign of Khusrō Anoshirwān (531–578). The
previous understanding of the astrology involved
in the horoscope, set forth by D. N. MacKenzie
(“Zoroastrian Astrology in the Bundahišn,” Bul-
letin of the School of Oriental and African Stud-
ies, 1964, 27:511–529), has been replaced with
one that explains satisfactorily every word in this
opaque text. (His newly constituted text, its
translation, and a detailed philological and tech-
nical commentary is given by Raffaelli on pp.
66–135; copies of the original three Pahlavı̄
manuscripts are given on pp. 197–216.) The his-
tory of the transmission of the Bundahishn’s text
could have been further illuminated by his men-
tioning the planetary geography of the seven
vkil␣s␣ (Kēshvars) that accompanies the hor-
oscope in most of its Arabic, Greek, and Latin
derivatives, from the late eighth century on (see
D. Pingree, “Sasanian Astrology in Byzantium,”
to appear in the publication of the papers pre-
sented at the conference “La Persia e Bisanzio,”
held at Rome in 2002). But some of the Pahlavı̄,
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Arabic, Greek, and Latin texts that describe the
horoscope itself are presented by Raffaelli (pp.
137–162).
Much remains to be done in the history of Sas-
anian astrology, but this is a notably useful con-
tribution to it by a most promising young Pahlavı̄
scholar.
DAVID PINGREE
䡲 Middle Ages and Renaissance
Anthony Grafton. Cardano’s Cosmos: The
World and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer.
xii Ⳮ 284 pp., illus., bibl., index. Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999. $37.50
(cloth).
Anthony Grafton provides readers with an illu-
minating glimpse into the mental and physical
worlds of Girolamo Cardano, one of the Renais-
sance’s most intriguing figures. Cardano has
been the object of another important recent
study, Nancy Siraisi’s The Clock and the Mirror:
Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine
(Princeton University Press, 1997). The two
books are complementary, examining different
facets of an individual whose intellectual range
and interests can be bewildering. In Cardano’s
Cosmos, Grafton succeeds in bringing order to
his subject’s life by examining the chief way in
which Cardano himself sought to understand the
world and his place in it: early modern astrology.
In a series of brilliantly crafted chapters, Graf-
ton leads the reader through Cardano’s efforts to
find a niche in the competitive world of Renais-
sance intellectuals. The internal technical crisis
in astrology enabled Cardano to manipulate tra-
ditional forms and genres of the astrologer’s art,
blending them in new ways that brought him na-
tional and international acclaim. We follow Car-
dano as he moves from an empiricist prognos-
ticator to a stylish astrologer who wrote gossipy
genitures for the rich and famous, both alive and
dead. Entering enthusiastically into the new print
culture, Cardano gained important clients such
as Edward VI of England and formidable adver-
saries such as Georg Joachim Rheticus and Luca
Gaurico. Near the end of the book we see how
Cardano’s familiarity with medicine and his pas-
sion for astrology led him towards the ambitious
humanist goal of restoring classical astrology.
Grafton draws persuasive analogues between the
early modern interest in restoring Hippocrates to
the medical canon, and Cardano’s belief that he
could essentially recapture Ptolemy’s lost source
texts for the Tetrabiblos. Cardano emerges as an
early historian of science, studying individual
 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 96 : 1 (2005)
genitures and astrological case studies in order
to piece together the case-based astrology that
informed Ptolemy’s masterwork.
One of Grafton’s great achievements in Car-
dano’s Cosmos is the way in which he draws
together Cardano’s interests in history, literature,
medicine, astrology, and other branches of
knowledge, such as magic, and uses this com-
bination of intellectual preoccupations to shed
light on the work for which he is best known,
On His Own Life (Lyons, 1557; Basel, 1562). As
is the case with much of Cardano’s work, his
autobiographical writings fit into well-estab-
lished traditions, but he took those traditions in
innovative directions. Astrology became the
chief tool Cardano used to interpret the events
of his life, capable of providing him with inti-
mate insights into the minutiae of daily activi-
ties, from diet to dreams, as well as giving him
a much broader perspective on the vicissitudes
of world events and politics. Grafton argues that
Cardano’s relationship with the discipline of as-
trology intensified his struggle to give order to
his life and heightened his awareness of the pass-
ing of time.
Readers of Grafton’s work have come to ex-
pect that they will be enlightened and entertained
if they join him on an excursion into the depths
of the early modern cultural and intellectual jun-
gle. His ability to humanize individuals who
lived a very long time ago by acknowledging
what made them both like us, and not like us, is
unmatched in contemporary scholarship. It is
surprisingly easy, upon finishing this book, to
imagine Cardano in the twenty-first century, us-
ing a Palm Pilot and buying scores of self-help
books. At the same time, we gain a deeper ap-
preciation for the Renaissance astrologer as a
product of his time, inextricably bound to the
specific contexts of early modern print culture,
political life, and the crisis in the discipline of
astrology.
DEBORAH E. HARKNESS
Peter Russell. Prince Henry “the Navigator”:
A Life. xvi Ⳮ 448 pp., illus., figs., apps., bibl.,
index. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
$35.
Prince Henry of Portugal (1394–1460) was the
third son of King João I and his Plantagenet
bride Philippa of Lancaster. Though never
crowned, the Infante D. Henrique was arguably
the most powerful magnate in the crescent king-
dom of Portugal for some forty years in the mid-
dle of the fifteenth century. His significance to
historians of science lies in his (much-disputed)
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105
role promoting the early years of Portuguese
commercial and exploratory voyaging to the
proximate Atlantic islands (Madeira, the Azores,
the Cape Verdes, and the Canaries) and down
the Atlantic coast of Africa. By the end of the
century, extending this enterprise, Bartolomeu
Dias and Vasco da Gama would round the Cape
of Good Hope, and other Portuguese navigators,
en route, would espy Brazil. An age of sea-cross-
ing exchange, expansion, and exploitation fol-
lowed, with profound implications.
A healthy tradition in the history of science
has seen these early Portuguese voyages as noth-
ing less than the dawn of scientific modernity.
In this analysis, the gusty trade winds blew Eu-
rope’s lateen sails beyond stultifying authority,
spookish legend, classical bunkum, and scrip-
tural dogmatism—at sea, empiricism breathed a
bracing, fresh air. Beyond Cape Bojador lay
truth, and even method. If such claims are no
longer exactly seen, recent work by Anthony
Grafton, David Goodman, Alison Sandman, and
others continues to examine the tantalizing re-
lationship between the early years of Portuguese
and Spanish overseas exploration and the history
of science.
Sir Peter Russell, a distinguished senior his-
torian of Iberia, has not done a great deal to link
his generally informative and readable new bi-
ography to these questions. The book’s closing
lines make a gesture (suggesting that Henrican
discoveries amounted to “a major scientific con-
tribution to European man’s knowledge of the
wider world about him,” [p. 364; see also p.
111]), but Russell offers no sense of what he
means by “scientific,” and his discussion of Por-
tuguese navigational techniques relies on J. H.
Parry’s The Age of Reconnaissance (Berkeley,
1963), now more than forty years old.
Which is not to say this is an unwelcome
book. It is detailed and learned, and though it
peters out at the end, it still succeeds in correct-
ing a hagiographic scholarly tradition that would
make of Henry a Renaissance prince and patron
of knowledge. Russell’s Henry, if enigmatic, is
a thoroughly “medieval” character: a royal mo-
nopolist, a chivalric and shameless debtor, a
knight of stern piety with a papistic, casuistical
bent where the niceties of slaveholding and cru-
sading against the infidel were concerned. As an
innovator in the business of colonial warfare, hu-
man bondage, and the tapping of distant re-
sources belonging to others, Henry appears to
have deployed an enterprising eye for good
counselors and an insatiable hunger for wealth.
It is not a flattering portrait, and if Russell’s don-
nish surety brings it off with some aplomb, one