Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England.

It is often claimed that modern science destroyed astrology by discrediting its intellectual foundations. Although this conviction doubtless gives many people a sense of comfort about the "rationality" of modern science, it can be easily refuted simply by glancing at the horoscopes in one's daily newspaper. The resilience and longevity of astrology, "springing up afresh after every apparent feat," not its supposed overthrow by modern science, is what attracts Patrick Curry to the subject. For him, the issue is not so much astrology's plausibility, but understanding why, after having been so convincing to so many during the Interregnum, the craft was so completely marginalized after the Restoration. A premise of this book is that rationality is an historical construct that has mainly to do with acceptability to those whose role in society it is to define the dominant culture's values. Accordingly, he sees the "decline" of astrology in terms of political interests, an approach that enables him to give a much more nuanced version of astrology's fortunes than any that have been so far attempted.

In the first part of the book, Curry discusses the fortunes of astrology from its flowering during the Interregnum until the beginning of its decline as a respectable discipline after the Restoration. In attempting to explain this change, he emphasizes the "deep involvement of astrology and astrologers with mid-century radical politics and religion." After the Restoration, the association of astrology with radical politics and sectarian religion cast suspicion on the art. Spokesmen for the new political order, including prominent members of the Royal Society, identified astrology with enthusiasm, popular disorder, and insurrection, and for this reason excluded it from official culture. Thus Thomas Sprat worried that astrology "withdraws our obedience from the true Image of God [and] affects men with fears, doubts, irresolutions, and terrors." Efforts by proponents of astrology such as John Childrey to reform the art by founding it upon heliocentrism and Baconian empiricism received a cool reception in the Royal Society: the association of astrology with sectarianism and radical politics was too strong.

From this point on, astrology was increasingly marginalized in English culture, a process for which Curry gives a fascinating and subtle analysis. He shows with a wealth of detail that astrology thrived in folk culture, spawning countless popular almanacs and books of astrolgical medicine. Although popular astrology was essentially operational, Curry insists that it was not merely a "ragbag of specific remedies and responses," but was a mentality, essentially animistic and pagan, which the dominant culture relentlessly atacked. But whereas in the seventeenth century the target of the anti-astrological rhetoric was its seditious radicalism, by the end of the eighteenth century official culture condemned astrology for its "tasteless and senseless vulgarity." In the meantime, "high astrology"--the kind based on philosophical or cosmological principles--was gradually extruded from scientific discourse.

Curry concludes his book with a sophisticated analysis of astrology's fortunes in terms of the history of mentalities. Taking his lead from E. P. Thompson's cultural definition of class, from Peter Burke's thesis concerning the "reform of popular culture," and from Antonio Gramsci's idea of hegemony, Curry argues that whereas the marginalization of astrology was a manifestation of the cultural hegemony of the patrician class, its survival embodied popular culture's resistance to this hegemony. This subtle, balanced, and richly detailed study will surely define the study of early modern astrology for some time to come. NEW MEXICO STATE UNIVERSITY