Nicolas Weill-Parot. Les "images astrologiques" au Moyen Age et a la Renaissance: Speculations intellectuelles et pratiques magiques (XII-XV siecle).

Paris: Honore Champion Editeur, 2002. 988 pp. index, append, bibl. 117 [euro]. ISBN: 2-7453-0449-6.

The Speculum astronomiae is a short treatise consisting of seventeen chapters and about thirty-five pages, organized in such a way as to explain to the reader the chief problems met with in astronomy and more specifically in the various branches of astrology; it provides a full list of the works treating these subjects that were available in the second half of the thirteenth century. The treatise was frequently copied and subsequently printed and continued in circulation right up to the Renaissance and later. As Lynn Thorndike wrote, "It is a very valuable treatise, shows remarkable bibliographical information and would be a credit" to its author, whoever he might be. It was copied as an anonymous work in many manuscripts or under the name of Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Campanus of Novara; never given to the franciscan Roger Bacon. Nearly a century ago Pierre Mandonnet, the founder and chief representative of Neoscholastic historiography, published an essay "Roger Bacon et le 'Speculum astronomiae' (1277)," Revue neoscolastique de philosophie, 1910, 17:313-35, in which he suggested that the traditional attribution to Albertus Magnus should be done away with and given instead to Roger Bacon. This idea has however been the subject of continual lively debate among historians such as Thorndike in his History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York: Columbia U.P., 1923), and in numerous essays. For a discussion of Madonnet's thesis, I refer readers to the first section, "A historiographical case-study," of my book The 'Speculum astronomiae" and its Enigma, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992, 1-42, which contains also an English translation. More recently new attributions have appeared: Bruno Roy has now published an article, "Richard de Fournival, auteur du 'Speculum astronomiae?'" Archives d'histoire doctrinale et litteraire du Moyen Age, 2000, 67:159-80, while Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, who has discovered new manuscripts, in his book Le "Speculum astronomiae: une enigme? Florence: SISMEL, 2001, is inclined to attribute the work to Campano da Novara.

Weill-Parot takes up the question anew and sets out to reexamine chapter 11 of the Speculum astronomiae, the same that Thorndike had analyzed in "Traditional Medieval Tracts concerning Engraved Astrological Images," in Melanges Auguste Pelzer (Louvain, 1947). But Weill-Parot is not particularly interested in the problem of attribution; having set out the theses of other scholars he solves the matter by means of the formula "Magister Speculi." His book is more about a definition given in the Speculum astronomiae: "[T]he science of images is added to the part of 'elections"'; after an "abominable" type of images and another which is "less unsuitable, but nevertheless detestable," the "Magister Speculi" distinguishes a third type and devotes his entire work to verifying the existence and history of this (241).

Although there were astrological treatises of an earlier date, going back to the Arabs and chiefly to Thabit, Weill-Parot emphasizes the fact that the first time the third type was distinguished so as to give it a purely astrological power was by the "Magister Speculi," in whom he discerns "a masked inventor." Weill-Parot maintains "that 'the astrological image' was originally a theory and not a practice and that its birthplace was the Speculum astronomiae" (17). "The idea of an 'astrological image' (imago astronomica) followed directly and was the result of marking out the limits of its relationship with other types of 'image.' Three ways of making 'images' are distinguished but only one of these is acceptable ... The rejection of these 'abominable images' is unambiguous. They are pure idolatry: the demons invoked by the enumerated practices (suffumigations, invocations, prayers, oral or written use of the names of demons) pretend to be ruled by the necromancer and to serve him, when in fact they lead him into an idolatrous cult" (34-35). "[In] short, the invention of the 'astrological image' is linked to the question of natural magic and corresponds to a process of intellectual deviation (detournement) of the function of the magical texts" (89).

This is a matter of great importance for distinguishing types of astrology and magic which are lawful because they are natural from those which are unlawful and demoniac, which was the chief aim of the Speculum astronomiae (which was written in order to oppose the censorship put forward by contemporaries) and later by many authors who accepted natural magic. Weill-Parot does not understand that the context is not one of disputation (as he surprisingly says in the case of Pico Garsias, 675), but censorship; it was opposition to censorship that gave rise to these distinctions and attempted to rescue "astrological images." He frequently quotes the formular with which the "Magister Speculi" presents himself as "zelator fidei." "He would not be able to go beyond the 'addressative' (destinative) value of magic rites, precisely because addressing (destination) is at the very heart of his conviction as a believer where Christian prayers are concerned" (173). He should have completed the quotation--"zelator fidei et philosophiae utriusque scilicet in ordine suo"--with which the "Magister Speculi" defines himself and the method of the "duae viae" (i.e., faith or natural philosphy) in face of contemporary censorship and the defense of non-demoniac talismans as well as of all astrology and natural magic in general which he warmly supported. Weill-Parot pursues these problems in al-Kindi, Guillaume d'Auvergne, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, and then more briefly in Matteo d'Aquasparta, John Peckham, Pierre d'Auvergne, Michael Scot, Cecco d'Ascoli, John of Eschenden, Leopoldus of Austria, Taddeo da Parma, John of Saxe, Andreas de Sommaria, Nicole Oresme, Heinrich von Langenstein, Arnaud de Villeneuve, Pietro d'Abano, Guy de Chauliac, and various other fourteenth-century physicians. After two censorship "affaires," in Paris in 1398 and Montpellier in 1425, in the fourth section, entitled "The Renaissance of the Images," Weill-Parot considers Antonio da Montolmo and Giorgio Anselmi da Parma senior; he then tackles what he calls "the Ficinian turning point," in particular the De vita, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and his censor Pedro Garsia, to conclude--after mentioning Galeotto Marzio da Narni, Pietro Pomponazzi, Pier Leone da Spoleto, Lorenzo Bonincontri, and others--with Girolamo Torrella, a physician who lived between 1456 and 1512 in Italy and in Valencia, who has already been studied by V. Perrone Compagni and M. Rotzoll. The first of these two scholars he has consulted personally: "Mme. V. Perrone Compagni did not hesitate to speak of bad faith on the part of the author of the Speculum astronomiae" (88, n. 174). A strange subject for discussion! Luckily, whoever the author may be and whatever the date of this treatise, there is no danger today of his suing for libel.

One would have read the book more willingly if the author, who quotes original texts very fully (in the notes) together with their translations, had cut down many cross-references and summaries of secondary literature, which in the first part sometimes give the impression of a highly detailed and "reasoned" inventory. Preceded by an article in the Revue d'histoire des sciences, 1999, 52.2:207-40, this "these d'etat," prepared under the direction of Andre Vauchez, Guy Beaujouan, and Danielle Jacquart (but with no historians of philosophy), has an imposing primary and secondary bibliography, which however tends to focus more on texts and studies from France, Italy, and Spain. For this reason the research stops with Girolamo Torella, whose sole merit is that of having written and published in 1496 an Opus praeclarum de imaginibus astrologicis (780-870). Strangely enough, Weill-Parot underestimates the German tradition--Trithemius, Agrippa, and Paracelsus. This is a pity because in Trithemius' Antipalus maleficiorum he would have found that very chapter 11 of the Speculum astronomiae which this author took as a model, copied, and brought up to date in order to produce in 1508 a bibliography of magic.

PAOLA ZAMBELLI

University of Firenze