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ASTROLOGY AND HUMAN VARIATION IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2013

MARK S. DAWSON
MARK S. DAWSON*
Affiliation:
The Australian National University
*
School of History, Research School of Social Sciences, 2107 Coombs Building, Australian National University, Fellows Road, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australiamark.dawson@anu.edu.au
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Abstract

Processes for the identification of criminal suspects tell us a great deal about wider cultural assumptions and social prejudices regarding somatic difference; its causes, relative degree, and consequence. If early modern Europeans had something approaching a forensic science, it was astrology, which has recently garnered renewed attention from historians of ideas. Rather than assume astrology's seventeenth-century decline in the face of revolutionary natural philosophy, what follows suggests that English astrology remained significant for mundane bodily discrimination, in the context of both a more deliberate, gradual reform and the tenacity of centuries-old humoral physiology. More importantly, scrutiny of astrological practice, and the logic underpinning its lasting currency, can reveal much about the significance of bodily contrasts and the meanings ascribed to them by Tudor-Stuart folk.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , March 2013 , pp. 31 - 53
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

In late September 1605, George Benson, a London lime-man dwelling at Broken Wharf, realized he had been robbed of forty shillings. Fortunately, help was close by. He had only to walk up Thames Street to speak with Edward Gresham. The surviving note of Gresham's advice is frank and authoritative. The culprit was described as ‘some comon harlott with whom he had to do. She is of low & small stature fatt bodyed round face fleagmatick complexion but comly brown coullor.’ The record is equally terse and ambiguous. Gresham's description relied on ‘Judgement of this figure’, a horoscope situating the crime in time and space, but also scrutiny of the figure, the luckless labourer, seated before him.Footnote 1 Gresham considered the wrong perpetrated by an individual naturally inimical to Benson; one inclined not simply to transgress but to do so in certain ways, and at particular moments, because her person and personality, or life, intersected with that of the victim, predisposing her to the crime. In the previous six months, Gresham had performed hundreds of acts of astrological triangulation.Footnote 2 To his rooms, adjacent Dyers Hall, came a knight, gentlemen, Cheapside goldsmiths and drapers, the wives of a JP and Custom House officials, merchants from the Exchange, innholders, butchers, tailors, cobblers, weavers, sailors, and a dyer too. While some had questions about their health or relationships, most wanted Gresham to act as a kind of consulting constable, supplying profiles of the otherwise unknown parties to theft, and, occasionally, personal affray.

It was as if celestial rays had spattered crime scenes, creating telltale silhouettes, or the culprits had left behind some sort of cosmic trace evidence used to deduce the type of person responsible. So, two generations later, the empiric William Salmon considered a person born with the Sun in the ascendant would find, at certain times, that their planet's relative position meant ‘many sorrows afflict … the Native, troubles and contentions from Saturnian men and things’.Footnote 3 And another generation after that advice, George Parker's 1718 almanac cautioned readers to be wary of those born under the ‘Malifick Ray’ of Mars and Mercury because they would be backbiters, liars, fraudsters and robbers. As proof, Parker offered the horoscope of Susanna Saker, evidently apprehended with astrological assistance and recently executed for coining.Footnote 4

There is an extensive historiography on the idea that the heavens condition earthly affairs. Keith Thomas's magisterial Religion and the decline of magic charted Tudor–Stuart astrology and inspired a generation of historians. We have studies of prominent practitioners: John Dee, the Elizabethan polymath; Simon Forman, the Jacobethan physician; William Lilly, the Civil War polemicist.Footnote 5 The importance of astrology to popular culture, in everything from drama and cheap print to consumer goods, is well established.Footnote 6 So too a narrative: a mid-seventeenth-century cynosure followed by eclipse as the waxing of modern rational thought, along with a restored monarchy, left superstitious and allegedly regicidal enthusiasms the property of credulous plebs.Footnote 7 There is also a substantial literature on early modern crime and policing of social order, including the identification of criminals courtesy of newspaper advertisements.Footnote 8 But how did people act before the advent of these printed mercuries, or what arguably became tools of an enlightened discrimination?Footnote 9 Tracking those responsible for burglary, assault, fraud, or homicide was no easy task. Hue-and-cry warrants were costly and not especially fleet. Impediments to detection ranged from the feebleness of artificial lighting through to dead men telling no tales.Footnote 10 Vexed owners or employers, injured victims, and grieving families turned to astrology. Astrology became profiling early modern style: consulting almanacs, casting horoscopes, and examining the physiognomy of victims or suspects crudely equivalent to a modern crime lab's microscopy and genomic testing, its psychological assessments and polygraphed interrogations.

Study of this astral surveillance suggests not only that we reprise our assumptions about astrology's decline, but also that we can extend our understanding of embodiment, especially contemporary explanations for why people were physically distinct from one another, and how these perceptions made somatic variation the basis for social discrimination. Drawing on the ancient authority of Hippocrates and Galen, early moderns considered that everyone's physiology, their ‘temperament’ or ‘complexion’, comprised a combination of elemental humours: the sanguine, phlegm, choler (or yellow bile), and melancholy (or black bile). For scholars concerned with this paradigm's implications for social inequality, a recent focus has been the role of the environment, or ‘climate’, in shaping people's bodily complexions. Yet, when discussed in terms of a so-called geohumoralism,Footnote 11 we risk foreshortening our own understanding of seventeenth-century explanations for human variation. If people ranged the cosmos looking to explain themselves and their worldly differences, we cannot afford to ignore the ramifications of what should more accurately be termed astro-humoralism. As John Gadbury expounded in his 1668 almanac:

all Nations or People are made of one Blood. Nevertheless, all Philosophers and Physitians, &c., agree, That this Blood is not equally fermented in all Persons; nor yet are the conduit pipes or channels which it passeth, or where it principally circulates, alike in all bodies: whence proceeds the differences of appetites, affections and passions in, and among Men and Women: This alone being the propinquinate cause, as the Stars are the remote causes of such differences.Footnote 12

I

Those claiming to be adepts at astrology applied their skills to the pedestrian pursuit of stray persons and property nonetheless. Forman's case-notes show that restitution of goods as well as health was all in a day's work. One moment he treats melancholy, the next he consults pro rebus fur.Footnote 13 Perhaps preoccupied with his angelic communions, Dee's records are more trenchant. Yet, the very partiality of one memorandum about a jewellery thief suggests Dee was able to flesh out the unwritten features of the suspect's person on the basis of the celestial circumstances at the time of the robbery.Footnote 14 In his landmark treatise, Christian astrology, Lilly explained how he recovered stolen monies by adhering to an exquisitely detailed calculation, which fellow practitioners and his client had disputed.Footnote 15 Lilly trumpeted his success at detection to establish his authority as an astrologer, and, paradoxically, to promote best-selling publications allowing a diverse audience to practise the same.Footnote 16

Astral surveillance was not the domain of a bookish minority. Genteel and middling people sought the advice of experts touted in the colophons of these same publications, or by handbills promising services ranging from medical therapy to figure-casting and one-on-one tuition in the same.Footnote 17 They performed astrological calculations to order their own lives, aided perhaps by printed templates.Footnote 18 Norris Purslow, a Wapping clothier, kept an archive of horoscopes for his entire adult life.Footnote 19 So too a Sussex merchant, Samuel Jeake. Horoscopes were the basis for a diary accounting for the ebbs and flows of Jeake's business as well as his health, while the diary itself functioned as a record against which he tested astrology's tenets – tenets he learned from his father, by studying the day's main publications, and by corresponding with other practitioners.Footnote 20 The acumen and litigiousness of Jeake's contemporary, James Boevey, an Anglo-Dutch financier, also seems to have had some basis in astrology and its capacity for a particular sort of discrimination. We know Boevey wrote extensively on this and related subjects, and that his personal mantra was ‘red-haired men never [have] any kindness for [me]’.Footnote 21 His friend and biographer, John Aubrey, noted Boevey was fortunate because ‘in all his travels he was never robbed’, apparently assuming that Boevey was fore-armed with knowledge of the most propitious times for journeys which avoided persons of malign intent and/or auburn locks.Footnote 22

The labouring sort consulted cunning folk, who relied as much on oral lore as prescribed tenets or scripted calculations when formulating a profile of persons wanted yet unknown.Footnote 23 Humbler people also called upon those who were, as Lilly put it, ‘niblers’ at the art.Footnote 24 Before the courts, we find cutlers, glovers, chandlers, millers, woolcombers, and cordwainers vindicating, even acknowledging en passant, their engagement with so-called ‘lawful questions’ in astrology.Footnote 25 When these questions concerned criminal detection, their answers evidently had the approbation of at least some of the community, perhaps supplemented makeshift household economies, and might even have involved participation in warrant hearings.Footnote 26

About the time he began policing the mores of the people of Aylsham, Robert Doughty, a justice from Restoration Norfolk, commenced a précis of astrology. Although we cannot be sure of the purpose behind the squire's compilation, and the extant manuscript is incomplete, it is nevertheless intriguing to speculate about how Doughty's magistracy may have been shaped, even if indirectly, by such assumptions as: ‘When [Saturn] doth reygne there is much theft used & little charity much lying & much Laweing one against another, & great Imprisoning & much debate & great Swearing.’ Or ‘the man that is borne under Saturne shalbe false envious & full of debate & full of Law … & he shall have stinking breath & he shalbe heavy, thoughtfull & malicious … , shall have little eyes, black haire, great lips, broad shoulders & shall looke downewards’.Footnote 27

The social dominance of the gentry was ideally tempered with charitable benevolence. Elite women dispensed medical aid to their tenants.Footnote 28 We have numerous recipe books attesting to this; some capture astrologically based therapeutics. Lady Ann Fanshawe's domestic miscellany, from the third quarter of the seventeenth century, sensibly reminded her that the crab claws needed to make an anti-pyretic should be ‘taken when the Sunne is in Cancer in June, or the beginning of July (for then they have much more Vertue then at other times)’.Footnote 29 With reference to consulting the ‘testimonies of the planets’, the household jottings of Cecilia (Bindloss) Standish suggest assistance of another, related sort was sometimes at hand. Hailing from rural Lancashire, Lady Standish resorted to astrology for insight concerning members of her family, their health, longevity, marital happiness, and, understandably for someone of pedigree, implicitly their fertility too. Nonetheless, she made astrological calculations regarding lost property for others, including one Jane Bateson whose house had been ‘broken open’ in 1662.Footnote 30

II

People practising astrology, whom I shall refer to collectively as astrologers, cast figures, drew up schemes or horoscopes, for their clients. Figures situated a client in time and terrestrial space, and, with this vector established, plotted the relative position of the planets so that the influence of the celestial configuration on the client could be triangulated and the effects interpreted.Footnote 31 Situating a client was a contested business. Some of the circumstances in which astrologers were consulted were said to require only the factoring of the here and the now. However, reference could also be made to the client's person and their past. Their geniture or nativity, the celestial configuration at birth, was believed capable of resolving a present predicament or making a prediction on the basis of forecasting planetary influences on the client, which were still over the horizon so to speak.

Prediction was perilously ambiguous. It was the perennial target of astrology's opponents. Opposition was not merely technical. Beyond doubts about the ability to account accurately for time's passage and to compute the geometry of what was literally a cosmic array of influences, early modern English people, like their medieval ancestors and European cousins, worried that celestial prognostication clashed with Christian prophecy. Many argued that to gauge what would happen was to gainsay God.Footnote 32 Divine providence, perhaps a miraculous re-alignment of the heavens, would always foil attempts to see into the future.Footnote 33 Therefore, those claiming the contrary, that the stars could be deciphered and time mastered by mere mortals, were sometimes assumed to be subject to devilish tutelage-cum-delusion.Footnote 34

Such objections encouraged de facto reform of astrology, and the scope for prediction narrowed. Foretelling discrete events years ahead of time or speculating on the exact fates of other people, particularly the powerful, fell from favour. Historiography suggests that disenchantment with this so-called judicial astrology was already in motion by the later sixteenth century.Footnote 35 A more circumscribed prognosis persisted, although it did not go unchallenged. This assaying considered queries, or ‘interrogations’, such as should the sick be given one therapy over another, and according to what regimen? Mundane probabilities (what sort of person will I marry and how many children will we have? to what occupations am I best suited?) were licit and popular.Footnote 36 These practices remained acceptable precisely because inquiry was not supernatural but natural; it referred to the physiognomy of the person consulting the astrologer, who might just as easily be a practitioner of physic like Forman.Footnote 37 After all, almanacs habitually gave advice concerning diet and the most appropriate times to bathe, purge, or be bled.Footnote 38 And Thomas Bretnor's 1613 annual argued not only that doctors must use their clients’ horoscopes to help customize treatments for individuals, but also that clients return the compliment by judging their physicians’ professional fitness on the basis of their physiques.Footnote 39

Astral surveillance of crime was probably not regarded as predictive forecasting. As Gresham's records suggest, astrologers established the celestial configuration at the time of the crime, and extrapolated retrospectively the identity of the ‘quesited’, the person asked after or responsible. While an astrologer, or suitably primed client, might ultimately nominate a suspect, identifying an individual by name or relation to the client, surveillance first dealt in typicality, particular sorts or categories of people. Elias Ashmole, herald, antiquary, numismatist, and the man who preserved the archives permitting historians to reconstruct the careers of Dee, Forman, and Lilly, maintained a journal that shows him casting figures in relation to all kinds of personal matters. He advised on felonies as diverse as the theft of a petticoat or the slaying of a horse. For the latter he concluded in October 1650:

It doth appear to be [a person of jovial complexion or a Jovialist] who killed the horse and represents one that the quaerent had some difference with about the beginning of August last (for then [Jupiter] and [Mercury] were in [quartile i.e. at a 90° angle]) a servile fellow [Jupiter] in [Scorpio] signifies a fleshy drunken fellow full-faced a kind of a dark chestnut or black hair having some scars and pock-holes in his face living North from the quaerent's house or North-East.Footnote 40

Or as Lilly discoursed on an exemplary figure for ‘a servant fled’:

The ascendant, and [Mercury] in [Aquarius], together with [Mars] posited in the ascendant, did signifie the Master of the Servant, who was short of stature, corpulent, of a good complexion, and ruddy, fresh countenance; his fatnesse I conceive from the North Latitude of [Mercury], which was about one degree; as also, that the degrees ascending were in the Termes of [Mars], in an ayëry Signe, and in the Face or Decanate of [the Sun], now posited in a watry Signe, and in partill [trine i.e. an aspect of 120°] to [the Moon], both in moyst Signes, which argued a flegmatick, full body, &c.

The Significator of the Servant was [Mars] peculiarly in this Figure, although many times [Mercury] shall signifie a fugitive Servant: The Servant was a young Fellow of about nineteen, a well set Fellow, short, big joynted, broad and full faced, dark brown hair, his teeth growing ill favouredly, a Sun burnt, obscure complexion, yet the skin of his body cleer.Footnote 41

III

The combination of humours comprising an individual's complexion explained physical characteristics as well as mental capacity or behavioural propensities. This logic also worked in reverse: one's physiognomy, whether read in one's face, palm, or stature, was evidence of both personality and innate humoral balance.Footnote 42 Different combinations sustained different bodies. Health was fundamentally a question of maintaining the peculiar mixture with which one had been born. In a fallen world, it was impossible to expect that anybody would possess a physiology with the humours in perfect, perpetual balance.

Physicians advised that many people's native humoral bias should not be considered singularly sanguineous, phlegmatic, choleric, or melancholic. They thought in terms of combinations. So did astrologers when they said that the celestial signs ‘mix their significations’.Footnote 43 In his unfinished collection of biographies, John Aubrey, the aforementioned antiquary and a friend of Ashmole's, drew connections between personage and personality, explaining how his subjects’ characters were reflected in their complexions; their physiques indicative of their achievements.Footnote 44 Aubrey verified such links with reference to natal horoscopes. Some he calculated for the purpose, others he assembled with the help of fellow natural philosophers.Footnote 45 Perhaps Aubrey's single-longest commentary on bodily appearance came in his life of political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, his extensive notes concluding, ‘He was Sanguineo-melancholicus; which the physiologers say is the most ingeniose complexion.’Footnote 46 The sanguine and melancholic humours were, so to speak, co-dominant in Hobbes's temperament. The sanguine were typically rulers; melancholics scholarly by inclination. For his biography of Sir William Petty, physician, political economist, and inaugural president of Dublin's natural philosophical society, Aubrey corresponded with Charles Snell, esquire, of Hampshire. Snell's recollection of Petty, native to the same county and someone diffident about both his humble origins and running away to sea as a young man, included a horoscope. From it, Aubrey observed:

The Complexion of the Native seemeth to bee phlegmatique, or at least phlegmatique sanguine, the body strong, well composed, somewhat inclining to tallnesse, the hayre dark-flaxen; but the hayre very often according to the parents.

The Native certainly is of a very healthfull constitution … The cholerique and Saturnine humours stirred up by the [opposition] of [Mars] to the sixth house and [Venus] in it … are very much alleviated by [Luna] Lady of the sixth in [sextile: i.e. at a 60° angle] to it.Footnote 47

Petty's inclination for maritime adventure, and his long stint surveying in Ireland too, could be explained by his native temperament, dominated as it was by phlegm, which was elementarily cold and wet.

As it was axiomatic that the humours made the human body a microcosm of nature, so the heavens were believed principally responsible for varying humoral combinations, which made human bodies at once different yet fundamentally similar. Almanacs inventoried the nature of the seven planets, or wandering stars, and therefore their humoral character.Footnote 48 For example, ‘Saturne is a Planet cold and dry, not altering his coldnesse, because it is a quality active; but his drynesse a quality passive: … of colour pale and wan, like to lead.’Footnote 49 A treatise like Christian astrology might elaborate that Saturn ‘being far removed from the heat of the Sun’ was ‘Melancholick, Earthly, Masculine, … author of Solitarinesse, Malevolent, &c.’Footnote 50 By way of contrasting example, Jupiter's ‘quality is hot and moist, temperate, sanguine’.Footnote 51 Exactly how the planets operated upon ‘inferior bodies’ was controversial, with precedence given variously to light, heat, motion, or magnetism.Footnote 52 Nevertheless, there was agreement that each planet's influences, or ‘vertues’, differed in temporal and spatial terms.Footnote 53 A principal variable was the interrelationship of the celestial bodies themselves. Different spatial alignments, or ‘aspects’, meant that a given planet's influence was temporarily and relatively stronger or weaker compared with the others.

Furthermore, each planet's influence was refracted and therefore altered by its orientation toward the fixed stars, the constellations symbolized by the zodiac. Each constellation had its own temper and influence.Footnote 54 For example, Henry Alleyn's almanac schema for January 1606 explained how ‘Aquarius, the signe which the Sunne entereth into, the tenth day of this present month, is of the West, masculine, ayrie, and sanguine.’Footnote 55 Once again, weightier tomes iterated further layers of detail.Footnote 56 There were, therefore, myriad combinations of celestial influences radiating to earth, and a cascade of astrological publications sought to identify, catalogue, and track them. As secondary causes, or God's instruments, there must ultimately be an order to the heavenly bodies.Footnote 57 It was the accounting for multiple influences that explains how astrologers could offer rival interpretations, and why people persisted in using horoscopes even after they had apparently failed to resolve a particular situation. The failure must be one of ignorant miscalculation or deliberate fraud on the part of those claiming expertise, rather than the absence of such influences per se.Footnote 58

With natal horoscopes, astrologers plotted the heavenly situation at the time of a client's birth.Footnote 59 This situation was sectioned into twelve houses, each an arc of 30 degrees and corresponding to a different facet of the client's life. The state of the first house, lying due east, is the most relevant here. The arrangement of that celestial zone corresponded with a person's physique, intellect, and manners. In his textbook, Genethlialogia, ‘whereby, any man (even of an Ordinary Capacity) may be enabled to discover the most Remarkable and Occult Accidents of his Life’, Gadbury stated that the first house ‘hath proper Signification of the Life of the Native; his Stature, Form, and Shape; the Temperature and Accidents of the Body; the Qualities of the Minde … as Galen saith: the Visage, its Fashion, Complexion, and Colour, and all the Parts thereof’.Footnote 60

To reprise some of our earlier examples of celestial influence in terms of their repercussions for somatic variety, Jupiter was said to give an ‘upright tall stature, ruddy Complexion, oval Visage, the Forehead high and large, a large grey Eye, brown hair, of a [Chestnut]-colour, the Body every way well compos'd, and the Person, whether Man or Woman, is sober, grave, discreet, and of a noble disposition’.Footnote 61 And Aquarius ‘shews one of a tall well-set thick corporature, of a strong body, of a long visage, sanguine complexion; if Saturn be therein, he gives black hair; otherwise commonly the party signified thereby, is of a fair flaxen hair, and of a paler whiter countenance’.Footnote 62 As we can see from this last example, astrologers aimed to trace which star ruled the first house, and therefore had the most significant impact on their subject's physique. Yet, they often had to factor into the equation the ruling star's diverse relation to other heavenly bodies, thus heightening or diminishing both positive and negative effects of the relatively dominant planet. In a similar vein:

The Conjunction of Jupiter and Mars, if Jupiter be significator makes the native chollerick, hasty, angery, bold, proud, presumptious [sic] and daring; gives him some Martial Command, and gives him glory and renown in War-like undertakings: but if Mars be significator, it makes him milder, religious, good, just, gives him preferment in the Law, or he becomes a Priest, Deacon, Bishop, or Arch Bishop.Footnote 63

Jeake even attempted his own quantification of these effects that, to risk anachronism, we might describe as a kind of astro-genetic frequency, an early modern DNA profile.Footnote 64 He tabulated the influences present when he was born, categorizing each in terms of its elemental quality and rating its strength on an ascending scale from one to six. Finding that the hot and dry elements had the highest score, he had a basis for deeming his complexion fundamentally predisposed to the choleric.

The configuration of the other houses also spoke to physicality. The sixth house, alluded to in Aubrey's evaluation of Petty's nativity, was revelatory of a person's lifelong predisposition to particular diseases; the weak points of their innate complexion.Footnote 65 Scrutiny was considered capable of testing candidates for employment, of discerning those who were honest and would best suit the employer's own temperament. Ashmole used horoscopes to assay the characters of his and others’ servants, lodgers, and apprentices before contracts or indentures were completed – a type of crime prevention when letters of reference were unavailable or untrustworthy.Footnote 66 The seventh house indicated the sorts of people, or personalities, one should have as friends or adversaries.Footnote 67 Likewise this house's configuration allowed astrologers to sketch the identity of suspects responsible for harming the client, whose own character was established courtesy of the first house.Footnote 68

IV

Assessment of the seventh house permitted astrologers to gauge not only the degree of marital bliss one would enjoy, but also the appearance and deportment, even the ethnic origin, of one's ideal partner.Footnote 69 Indeed, astrologers suggested a match was best made with reference to the degree of compatibility witnessed between the partners’ paired horoscopes and persons.Footnote 70 If the prospective partner's nativity was unavailable, astrologers might use their complexion as a substitute.Footnote 71

This last circumstance raises the issue of what we would term biological inheritance, the transmission of traits from parents to offspring.Footnote 72 Reproduction was a process that many believed finally resolved by the stars.Footnote 73 Didactic literature for would-be parents usually framed procreation as a process of humoral recombination. Generational inheritance was about seeds mixing; the result of paternal and maternal contributions, begotten of corresponding humoral temperatures, competing to define the child's own complexion in utero. The much-studied guide to human fertility, Aristotle's masterpiece, explained how couples could have a son rather than a daughter, even a child appearing more like the father than the mother.Footnote 74 For a son, who would be a chip off the old block, recommendations were made so that the male seed would be vigorous and prevail at conception. Husbands were to monitor their diets’ humoral consequences and be active in bed. However, the last, most striking, instruction was that intercourse should occur under specific (masculine) constellations, otherwise hinting that everything would be for naught. Other advice-books shared this logic, one that might easily have been borrowed from astrological treatises.Footnote 75 In forecasting for the coming year, almanacs flagged when would be a ‘good Season to get Children in’.Footnote 76 Astrologers accepting the effectiveness of sigils, which would draw down or repel celestial influences, suggested wearing these talismans during intercourse,Footnote 77 and were otherwise asked to verify paternity.Footnote 78 Almanacs advised on other sorts of husbandry; when to sow particular seeds, graft plants, or have mares covered.Footnote 79 For some parents, it may have seemed simpler still. Their union and the character of their offspring were foreshadowed in, and explained by, their own nativities. Hence, Jeake fathomed his geniture by correlating it with his parents’ nativities, and he represented this sidereal lineage graphically using the pendant forms one usually associates with heraldic pedigrees. He evaluated the celestial situation on his wedding night, his bride's horoscope, and, eventually, their daughter's.Footnote 80

Astrologers, and virtually anyone who voiced an opinion on astrology's validity, debated the definition of nativity. Most probably assumed that parturition was a defining moment. Parents, or their kin, laboured to record the day, hour, and, if possible, the minute of birth, not so much for the sake of posterity but, rather, to put this data to astrological use.Footnote 81 Indeed, this practice itself contributed to what has been described as a horological revolution.Footnote 82 Understandably, many records were left in the margins of almanacs. We are just beginning to appreciate the extent of life-writing facilitated by these publications, hundreds of thousands of which circulated annually.Footnote 83 There are, however, some surviving instances where official records served similar ends. The principal genethliacal details for future cleric Samuel Smith were recorded in the baptismal register for St Thomas's, Dudley, Worcestershire, on 29 February 1584. Not too surprising given that his father was vicar there.Footnote 84 More eccentric are Henry Crabtree's notations. Having baptized the days-old James Taylor in late 1685, Crabtree, a Lancashire curate, occasional almanac writer and physician, implied that he would soon be burying the infant, scribbling in the parish register that poor James's horoscope included a ‘sure token of short life’.Footnote 85

Astrologers grumbled that clients were ignorant of their vital statistics, or could not proffer them with suitable accuracy such that any advice would itself lack precision.Footnote 86 Those accepting the importance of a querist's birthday were confronted with complications. For instance, if labour were protracted was the emergence of the child's head decisive, sufficient to count as birth? What if the baby were breeched and the feet delivered first – did one wait for the head?Footnote 87 Astrologers were preoccupied with locating nativity in time and space because this allowed them to calculate the celestial influences that had left their mark on their clients. For instance, opposite a genethliac scheme for a son named after his own father, Arthur Dee drew, at some point post-1606, a male figure surrounded by geometric stippling suggesting the heavenly radiations at work on the boy.Footnote 88 Celestial configurations were likened to seals or stamps that had impressed the flesh and turned what would otherwise have been shapeless blobs of wax into distinctive insignia.Footnote 89 Similar metaphors were used by those who contended that life began at conception, and who therefore counted back to the stellar situation at that conjunction.Footnote 90 In either case, these metaphors verge on the deterministic. We have already seen how astrologers were remarkably persistent in linking the different stars with various body types. The language employed to draw these connections is telling. The planets ‘cause’, ‘give’, ‘maketh’, ‘prescribe’, or ‘personate’ individuals ‘born under’ them.Footnote 91

Yet, these circumstances neither made reproduction an entirely random process, nor one's existence simply a question of how lucky one's stars happened to be. Jeake reasoned:

As some pretend that nothing proceeds from an Astral Cause by way of hidden influence, but only by the visible influences of Light & heat: so others run into the contrary extreme and affirm that every effect proceeds from an Astral Cause. But this is also an Error. For as it is from the nature of the seed, & not from the Stars that a man begets a man & not a beast: the Stars only influencing & qualifying the matter they find to work upon.Footnote 92

Henry Coley, a joiner's son and an autodidact who had been apprenticed tailor, explained how an ‘Ordinary Person or Rustick’ and a nobleman born under exactly the same heavenly configuration would nonetheless have distinct personages as well as lives. Their respectively humble or genteel lineages meant that they were already of different stuff, wax of different clarity, which the stars then sealed.Footnote 93 Further, Coley's mentor, William Lilly, suggested that the clarity of the wax affected what sorts of impressions it could receive.Footnote 94 Hence base-born people did very often not transcend their parents’ lowly origins even if born under the most auspicious skies.

V

Contemporaries wrestled with the deterministic implications of astrology. To prognosticate about an individual's wellbeing, their best partners, or the occupation most suited to their person, was surely to assume that their life's pathway was set down, at least in outline, from birth.Footnote 95 Astrology's wisdom was damned either way when it came to the eschatological crossroads of early modern Protestantism. On the one hand, prognostication prescribed an otherwise ineffable predestiny. Only God was meant to know who were elect; those already sainted to be saved. On the other hand, cosmic necessity contradicted earthly autonomy. Astrology's alleged capacity to read the fates seemed to refute the exercise of free will and moral choice by mortals unable to evade the effects of celestial forces.Footnote 96

It is easy to exaggerate the remoteness of seventeenth-century reticence concerning physical permanence from modern emphases on a biological determinism, so vocal did criticism of astrology become. In other words, the contingency highlighted by several of astrology's opponents is apparently consistent with modern scholarly assessments that the humoral body, fluid and permeable, precluded any sort of essentialism. However, we should look beyond the hyperbole and recognize what the majority of astrological adherents, and even their most ardent detractors, shared.Footnote 97

Few maintained that the stars dictated people's fates. Rather, under their influence, different people were inclined to live, to think and behave, in particular ways.Footnote 98 Most practitioners, as well as those wary of astrology, agreed that the stars did govern, establish from birth, one's mortal form. Hence Thomas Tryon, a self-educated shepherd prone to heterodox religious beliefs and medical theories, insisted that astrology properly practised allowed him ‘to discern the Complexion and Qualities of Animals, Minerals, and Vegetations … and likewise best understand[s] the human Nature and himself; for there is an Astrology within Man, as well as without him’.Footnote 99 Thinking its superstitious vagaries were the expedients of social upstarts cum political radicals, the royalist William Ramesey advocated astrology's active retrenchment, not trusting it to atrophy among ignorant plebs. However, dedicating his effort to James Stuart, Ramesey reserved one vital role for the discipline: ‘How to Judge of the particular Constitution and Temperature of the Body, and the Natural inclination of Man.’Footnote 100 Yet, similarly, John Partridge, son of a Thames waterman, apprentice cobbler turned astrologer, and staunchly whig opponent of James Stuart as the next king, explained in the preface of his own 1679 attempt at a reformed discipline:

Creation and Being, is the Power of a Deity only; but the quality of this Being, is by the great Keeper of Nature committed to the course of second Causes; These … are divided into several Streams or Currents; some gliding by the Banks with a pleasant murmur, while other Currents with their Rapid motion, act with greater vigor and force; this is the beginning of Action and Passion.Footnote 101

In short, astrological discourse relied on a dualistic understanding of humanity. The immortal, immaterial soul and its bestowing was supernatural, a divine mystery. The natural body, as the soul's residence, was variously its temple and its prison. The material burden of the flesh, with its peculiar humoral quality, weighed on the mind, affecting one's intellect and emotions, but volition and therefore faith were the soul's counter-balance.Footnote 102 When assessing his wife's nativity, Jeake noted contentedly that a mercurial sign in the ascendant promised she would have a goodly share of wit and ingenuity. Yet he added:

How many Nativityes have I seen that naturally come short in this particular of such a [Mercurial] influx: and yet the Subjects by assiduity & improvement of their portions have become eminent. Herein consists virtue, to repress such inclinations as tend to impertinency … Astral inclinations may be an exercise; not a rule of [?earthly] behaviour: this being regulated by an higher Law.Footnote 103

These philosophical issues were confined neither to introspective autobiography nor to theological tracts. As Richard Kirby opined in the preface to his 1684 almanac, ‘Let Man live meerly as a Natural Man, without Spark of Grace, the Influence of the Stars predominates; but where Grace rules, the Stars obey.’Footnote 104

Astrology's advocates lauded its practice as a means to self-knowledge. If a man realized he was born with Mars in the ascendant, and therefore of a choleric complexion, he could take appropriate action to curb a native irascibility.Footnote 105 People took the measure of psychological and physical differences according to what their nativity presaged. Hence, Thomas Browne remarked in his Religio medici: ‘At my Nativity, my Ascendant was the earthly signe of Scorpio, I was borne in the Planetary houre of Saturne, and I thinke I have a piece of that Leaden Planet in me. I am no way facetious, nor disposed for the mirth and galliardize of company.’Footnote 106 Recalling her youth, Lady Anne Clifford wrote:

I was through the providence of God begotten by my valiant father and my worthy mother the first day of May in [1589] … John Denham, a greate astronomer … would often say Thatt I had much in mee in nature to shew that the sweete Influences of the Pleiades and the Bands of Orion mentioned in the [Book of Job], were powerfull both at my Conception and Nativity.Footnote 107

Either by his own design or that of friends, Robert Burton, the suffering scholar of all things saturnine, was memorialized – by a suitably dark complexioned portrait bust and engraved horoscope – as the arch-melancholic whom nature had ordained to write black bile's anatomy.Footnote 108

VI

Reassessing Columbus's geographical trajectory in 1492, Nicolás Wey Gómez has highlighted the importance of an intellectual tradition that ‘conceived of place as the basis for explaining and predicting the constitution and behavior of all creatures in the “machine” of the cosmos … Place was largely the medium through which celestial bodies imparted form to sublunary creatures.’Footnote 109 Belatedly attempting to emulate so as to surpass the endeavours of Iberian conquistadors, when they ventured into the western or southern hemispheres, the English too employed astrological reckoning. Yet, establishing precisely how often they did so is a challenging task. Archival censuses and associated scholarship have tended to gloss over evidence of astral surveillance, instead foregrounding materials that seem to represent the modern disciplines of astronomy and meteorology. For instance, William Jackson prefaced the journal he kept as a crusading privateer on the Spanish Main with a paean to astrologers like Lilly and John Booker, but this praise was omitted from the modern transcription.Footnote 110 When the next generation of buccaneers also targeted Spanish interests in the Pacific during the 1680s, William Dampier recalled, in unpublished marginal annotations to his journal, that Charles Swan's crew had included an astrologer.Footnote 111 Likewise, only the most recent cataloguing of Edward Maynard's navigational commonplace-book hints at its true content. While the majority of its folios track later seventeenth-century Atlantic voyages, the volume includes Maynard's own epitome of astrology, which carefully details the ties binding different peoples and places with the cosmos.Footnote 112

Astrology remained a heuristic device useful for understanding foreign climes: flora and fauna as foods, commodities, and medicines; indigenous inhabitants as strangers, allies, or enemies. Thus, realizing that ephemerides would need to be recalculated for the new latitudes, Gadbury was commissioned by imperial bureaucrats to compute tables for, and offer advice to, Jamaican planters.Footnote 113 Coley averred in his almanac for 1679:

The Causes and Beginnings of mutations of Inferiour things ought to be taken from the variety of the Planets and fixed Stars &c … the Stars are the causes of the variation of inferiour things, either because the Stars move, or the earth, or both … Four times this year will the Luminaries be Eclipsed … The third … is of the Sun September 24, at 6 at night, not visible to us … But in New Zealand, and to those that sail upon the Pacifick Ocean it will appear a great Eclipse.Footnote 114

More succinctly, Jonathan Dove gave approximately the same assessment regarding ‘such as inhabit new Zealand[,] the Isle of S. Peter [i.e. St. Peter's Island in the Great Australian Bight]’.Footnote 115 These are two of the earliest references to southern Oceania and its denizens appearing in vernacular print. Closer to home, John Booker had tried to explain the turmoil of the civil wars by ascribing Irish rebellion, and forthcoming English vengeance, to intersecting ‘national’ horoscopes and rival temperaments.Footnote 116

If we remain earth-bound when assessing the implications of the humoral paradigm for early modern perceptions of somatic difference, we miss something important about the temper of these estimations of fellow human beings. This is not to doubt that complexions were considered contingent. Native humoral balances were forever precarious. And terrestrial horizons, or climatic latitudes, were important. Where people were born and lived on Earth was paramount. Ptolemaic, geocentric assumptions lingered amid Copernican revolutions, and for ordinary folk earthly circumstances often mattered most.Footnote 117 Nevertheless, the alleged fluidity of the humoral body has allowed some to take comfort in the notion that early moderns could not easily conceive of the permanent, innate bodily contrasts that would eventually underpin a racial hierarchy.Footnote 118 Contrariwise, evaluations of non-European peoples that appear to strain credulity are assumed to be an insincere, conniving convenience cloaking what must surely have been an incipient – if not insidious – racial prejudice. The archetypal example in this last regard concerns sub-Saharan Africans, and the commonplace that they were ‘black’ because of persistent exposure to the sun.Footnote 119 Reiterated in isolation by modern scholarship, the idea that African people were casualties of solar radiation can therefore seem asymmetrical, absurdly biased, possibly because we now think of ourselves as earthlings all living in a heliostatic, heliotropic galaxy.

Yet, to early moderns such an idea was never singular. The entire range of human variation was explained with reference to the radiance of all celestial bodies. For instance, what we now think of as freckles or melanomas were considered tokens of one's cosmic affiliations. Naevi were impressed at birth according to the planetary aspects. Freckles and moles were not the result of exposure to the sun's ultraviolet rays, rather contact with various stellar influences.Footnote 120 Claims that parallel those for Africans and the sun, specifically the sun under Capricorn, were made for other peoples of the world. For example, Jeake considered the

whole Earth is governed by the whole heaven; but each part thereof distinctly, cannot so plainly be subjected to all the heavenly host; for it evidently appears by the diversity of the soyle that some parts of earth have greater affinity with some parts of heaven, then with others; & by more free absorption of such particles will speedily be brought under their dominion: the ground thus impregnated, & holding a continual correspondence with [its] governor must necessarily by ingresse of these particles affect the natives with the qualityes proceeding from such parts of heaven. Thus Holland is … governed by … [Pisces] & … [Moon], by whose properties judgment is to be given of the manners of the Natives.Footnote 121

That is, as a people, the Dutch were generally phlegmatic in character, which complexion allegedly explained in turn their appetite for alcoholic beverages, as well, of course, as all that butter they, as first-rate mariners, insisted on taking to sea.Footnote 122 Although rooted in a different premise, one with a wider social currency and longer cultural life than some histories of early modern English astrology admit, the final effect was a typecasting that takes us from vocational aptitude or personality types, and ever closer to ethnic segregation and the taxonomies we associate with racism.Footnote 123

Footnotes

*

For helpful comments I thank the Journal's referees, my colleagues in Canberra, particularly Tania Colwell for also checking several British Library manuscripts, as well as seminar audiences in Newcastle and, across the Tasman, Auckland. At the University of Auckland, I had the opportunity to discuss my research with Michael Hunter, who has been unstintingly generous in sharing his knowledge of seventeenth-century natural philosophy and copies of archival material beyond my reach. I am grateful to the staff of the various archives, especially Jo Kirkham for the Rye Castle Museum. I thank my stars that I learnt about patient archival reconstruction and its rewards from Barry Reay and Keith Wrightson.

References

1 Anon., ‘Astrological treatises’, British Library, Sloane MS 3857, fo. 100v.

2 The aforementioned manuscript includes c. 250 horoscopes, dated April–October 1605, fos. 62r–106v. To my knowledge, these have not been attributed to Gresham, although the British Library catalogue describes another section of notes collected by ‘Mr Gresham’ from medieval works. The residences listed for many clients, or the locations whither they were directed by the astrologer, cluster around Gresham's place of business. The case-notes break off by early November 1605; when Gresham's situation became fraught because many believed that he had foretold the crime of the century, the Gunpowder Plot.

3 Salmon, William, Horae mathematicae (1679), p. 291Google Scholar. All pre-1800 works were published in London unless otherwise stated.

4 George Parker, Ephemeris (1718), sigs. B3rff. Ephemerides and almanacs were often printed with titles including the author's name and/or year. As the citations provide this information, titles have been abridged. Where there is ambiguity regarding a particular edition, a collection shelfmark or STC/Wing number is supplied.

5 Parker, Derek, Familiar to all: William Lilly and astrology in the seventeenth century (London, 1975)Google Scholar; Clulee, Nicholas, John Dee's natural philosophy: between science and religion (London, 1988)Google Scholar; Geneva, Ann, Astrology and the seventeenth-century mind: William Lilly and the language of the stars (Manchester, 1995)Google Scholar; Traister, Barbara, The notorious astrological physician of London: works and days of Simon Forman (Chicago, IL, 2001)Google Scholar; Kassell, Lauren, Medicine and magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman: astrologer, alchemist, and physician (Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar; Parry, Glyn, The arch conjuror of England: John Dee (New Haven, CT, 2012)Google Scholar.

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9 For the celestial connections, Geneva, Astrology, pp. 27–8.

10 Griffiths, Lost Londons, pp. 332–60; Koslofsky, Craig, Evening's empire: a history of night in early modern Europe (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 128–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Floyd-Wilson, Mary, English ethnicity and race in early modern drama (Cambridge, 2003)Google Scholar; Feerick, Jean, Strangers in blood: relocating race in the Renaissance (Toronto, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 John Gadbury, Ephemeris (1668), sig. D3r. Gadbury may have borrowed from Levinus Lemnius (trans. Anon.), The secret miracles of nature (1658), pp. 59–67, 280–1; Samuel Boulton, Medicina magica tamen physica (1665), pp. 28–35.

13 His Latin tag for cases concerning theft. Similar consultations are discussed in Rowse, Alfred, Simon Forman: sex and society in Shakespeare's age (London, 1974), pp. 44Google Scholar, 79, 156, 172. Lauren Kassell is working to transcribe and digitize Forman's case-notes, see www.magicandmedicine.hps.cam.ac.uk/

14 Fenton, Edward, ed., The diaries of John Dee (Oxford, 1998), p. 255Google Scholar. John Aubrey's biography of Dee records his ‘conjuring’ for stolen clothes, and his recovery of lost plate. See Clark, Andrew, ed., Brief lives, chiefly of contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey (Oxford, 1898)Google Scholar, i, pp. 213–14; Parry, Arch conjuror, p. 228.

15 William Lilly, Christian astrology (1647), pp. 394–6. Lilly followed with an account of using his skills to retrieve his supper, some purloined fish. His autobiographical writings, and memories of mentors and rivals, also suggest the frequency with which people resorted to astrological detection. See William Lilly, History (1721), pp. 21–9, 52, 74–5, 115–16; Thomas, Keith, Religion and the decline of magic: studies in popular belief in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England (Harmondsworth, 1971), pp. 305–22Google Scholar; Parker, Familiar, pp. 120–22.

16 Geneva, Astrology, pp. 63–71.

17 For instance, Anon., The professour hereof being a mathematitian is ready to perfome these things following … (1651: Thomason E.624[6]); Charles Atkinson, Panterpe (1674), sig. Av; Richard Kirby, Diurnal speculum (1684), sig. D4v; Anon., In Wine-Office-Court, Fleetstreet, at the sign of the Acorn liveth a gentlewoman, who will (by the blesung [sic] of God upon her endeavors) resolve to her own sex all manner of lawful questions, so far as reason can require or art warrant (1685: Wing A627B); Daniel Woodward, Honest invitations (1690: Wing W3477A); John Axford, The merchants daily companion (1700: Tract Supplement E2:4[211]).

18 For example, George Parker, Mercurius Anglicanus (1693), sig. [E8]v. A British Library copy (P. P. 2465: Wing A2008) has a list of books, many astrological, which were apparently part of the library of the almanac's first owner.

19 Norris Purslow, ‘Astrological diary’, c. 1690–1737, Wellcome Library, London, MS 4021.

20 Hunter, Michael and Gregory, Annabel, eds., An astrological diary of the seventeenth century: Samuel Jeake of Rye, 1652–1699 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 93Google Scholar, 100.

21 Clark, Brief lives, i, p. 113; Porter, Martin, Windows of the soul: physiognomy in European culture, 1470–1780 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 164–5Google Scholar, 208–9, 240.

22 Clark, Brief lives, i, p. 113.

23 Davies, Owen, Popular magic: cunning-folk in English history (London, 2007), pp. 96–107Google Scholar; Thomas, Decline, pp. 212–22, 302–5; Curry, Prophecy, pp. 102–5 and passim.

24 Lilly, History, p. 26.

25 Hardy, William Le, ed., County of Middlesex: calendar to the sessions records, new series, volume 1, 1612–1614 (London, 1935–41)Google Scholar, 8–9 Sept. 1613, qu. in Thomas, Decline, p. 348 (case involving a London apothecary, glover, chandler, and cutler); Court minutes, East India Company, 2 Aug. 1633, in William Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of state papers colonial: East Indies and Persia (London, 1860–1994), viii, pp. 438ff (company factor said to have figure-cast for stolen bales of silk); Essex Record Office, Q/SBa 2/75 (quarter sessions deposition of a miller from 1651); Pope, F. J., ‘“A conjuror or cunning man” of the seventeenth century’, British Archivist, 1 (1914), pp. 145–7Google Scholar (1685 case of Nottingham shoemaker); Earle, Peter, A city full of people: men and women of London, 1650–1750 (London, 1994), p. 197Google Scholar (woolcomber's testimony in a 1690 Court of Arches proceeding); the example of Thomas Perks, blacksmith, in A copy of a letter sent to the right reverend father in God, Edward Lord Bishop of Glocester, from a clergy-man of the Church of England, living in Bristol (Bristol, 1704).

26 See, for example, John Poole, Country astrology in three books (1650), sig. A3r; Thomas, Decline, pp. 345–6.

27 Robert Doughty, ‘Notes on astrology’, c. 1650, Norfolk Record Office, MS AYL 759, unfoliated. Doughty's notes derived either from Anon., The compost of Ptolomeus (1638), or Alexander Barclay, The shepheards kalender newly augmented and corrected (1656). Both texts had convoluted publishing histories and it is possible Doughty was borrowing from an unknown edition(s).

28 Nagy, Doreen, Popular medicine in seventeenth-century England (Bowling Green, OH, 1988)Google Scholar; Pollock, Linda, With faith and physic: the life of a Tudor gentlewoman, Lady Grace Mildmay, 1552–1620 (London, 1993)Google Scholar.

29 Ann Fanshawe, ‘Recipe book’, c. 1651–1707, Wellcome Library, MS 7113, fo. 57r. A similar instruction was recorded by Lady Grace Castleton, ‘Booke of receipts’, c. 1600–1699, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS Add. 940, p. 20. Which is not to say that such practice was the domain of women. See, for instance, from the pens of men who were apparently not physicians, George Noble, ‘Exellent recepts and medicines of all soartes to be used when necessarye both for younge and owld’, 1629, Wellcome Library, MS 579; Francis Elcocke, ‘List of diseases arranged under the signs of the zodiac’, 1651, Wellcome Library, MS 2287, pp. 1–136.

30 Cecelia Standish, ‘Astrological and horticultural notes’, c. 1625–75, Wigan Heritage Service, MS D/DSt C2/2, unfoliated.

31 This triangulation is readily apparent from diagrams in Christopher Heydon, An astrological discourse with mathematical demonstrations proving the powerful and harmonical influence of the planets and fixed stars upon elementary bodies in justification of the validity of astrology (1650), pp. 5, 10, 55, 86–8; William Hunt, Demonstration of astrology (1696), pp. 5–7, 27–30.

32 Thomas, Decline, pp. 358–85; Roos, Anna Marie, Luminaries in the natural world: the sun and the moon in England, 1400–1720 (New York, NY, 2001), pp. 11–65Google Scholar.

33 William Ramesey, Astrologia restaurata (1653), i, pp. 4–5; William Knight, Vox stellarum (1681), sigs. A3v–A5v.

34 Thomas Cooper, The mystery of witch-craft (1617), pp. 137–44; John Raunce, Declaration against judicial astrology (1650); John Gadbury, Animal cornutum (1654), sigs. C2rff; J[ohn] B[utler], Hagiastrologia (1680), pp. 51ff; Thomas Fowle, Speculum uranicum (1700), sig. Bv.

35 Thomas, Decline, pp. 285ff.

36 Richard Healy, Ephemeris (1658), sigs. A2–A3r; John Edwards, Cometomantia (1684), pp. 170–3, 204–11, 235.

37 William Lilly, Merlini Anglici (1679), sigs. A3–A[5]; John Gadbury's prefaces for Ephemeris (1670) and Thesaurus astrologiae (1674), as well as his astrological experiment where he had examined both the melancholic complexion and nativity of a woman claiming to be possessed by an evil spirit, Ephemeris (1679), sigs. [C7]v–[C8]v. Compare John Middleton, Practical astrology in two parts (1679), pp. 95–9, where the sincerity of the client and the accuracy of data they provided could be cross-checked against their physiognomy.

38 John Evans, Almanacke…composed according to art for the longitude & latitude of Shrewesburie (1630), sig. B[5]r; Richard Saunders, Apollo Anglicanus (1667), sigs. Crff; Jonathan Dove, Speculum anni (Cambridge, 1683), sigs. C2v–C4r.

39 Thomas Bretnor, Almanacke (1613), sigs. B2r–B4v.

40 Josten, Conrad, ed., Elias Ashmole (1617–1692): his autobiographical and historical notes, his correspondence, and other contemporary sources relating to his life and work (Oxford, 1967)Google Scholar, ii, p. 552. Parenthetical transliteration of astrological symbols is the author's own.

41 Lilly, Christian astrology, p. 391. See also for an almanac diarist's reference to a fugitive, Richard Allestree, Almanack (1643), sig. B4r, Bodleian Library copy, Wing A1244; a case and its prime suspect as explained by Daniel Woodward, Vox uraniae (1688), sig. [C7]v.

42 Finger and palm prints, as well as the contours of one's forehead, were said to epitomize one's nativity in dermal form. See Anon., Compost of Ptolomeus, sigs. J3ff, and n. 120.

43 Henry Coley, Clavis astrologiae elimata (1669; 2nd edn, 1676), pp. 534ff, 580ff; Richard Saunders's explanation of ‘How the Nativity may be found by the Physiognomie’ in his Physiognomie and chiromancie, metoposcopie (1671), pp. 171–3.

44 Hunter, Michael, John Aubrey and the realm of learning (London, 1975), pp. 113–33Google Scholar, 233–6.

45 Lilly, Christian astrology, p. 546, refers to scholars as having to be of a particular complexion, and some of his model nativities also refer to compound complexions, pp. 742–3. See too John Gadbury, The nativity of the late King Charls astrologically and faithfully performed (1659), pp. 14–15.

46 Clark, Brief lives, i, p. 347.

47 John Aubrey, ‘Collectio geniturarum’, c. 1674–7, Bodleian Library, Aubrey MS 23, fo. 12r.

48 So almanacs lost sight of the ancient distinction that planets were made of a sempiternal substance rather than the four elements, and thus effected terrestrial change but did not produce it substantively. See Westman, Robert, The Copernican question: prognostication, skepticism, and celestial order (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 2011), pp. 52–3Google Scholar.

49 John Wybard, Almanacke (1636), sig. [B6]v. Further examples of almanacs surveying the character of the planets include Joseph Blagrave, Ephemeris (1660), sigs. Bvff; Jonathan Swallow, Almanacke (Cambridge, 1683), sigs. B3vff; Jonathan Dove, Speculum anni (1708), sig. C3; Job Gadbury, Ephemeris (1712), pp. 7ff.

50 Lilly, Christian astrology, p. 58.

51 Wybard, Almanacke, sig. [B6]v. Cf. Lilly, Christian astrology, p. 63.

52 For this critical issue, see John Woodhouse, Almanack (1617), preface; Hardick Warren, Magick & astrology vindicated from those false aspersions and calumnies, which the ignorance of some hath cast upon them (1651); William Lilly, Anima astrologiae (1676, second edn, 1683), p. 5; Lancelot Coelson, Speculum perspicuum uranicum (1687), sigs. C3v–C4v.

53 Coley, Clavis, pp. 139–40. Occasional dissent concerning the character of these virtues nonetheless shared the more fundamental assumption concerning celestial influence, cf. Hunt, Demonstration, pp. 17–21.

54 See n. 49. For additional commentary, Samuel Ashwell, Almanacke … rectified for the meridian and latitude of Ongar in Essex (1641), sigs. B3ff; Coley, Clavis, pp. 19–31; J[ohn] B[utler], Hagiastrologia, pp. 64–6; Knight, Vox stellarum, pp. 55–65.

55 Henry Alleyn, Almanack (1606), sig. [B5]v.

56 Cf., for example, Lilly, Christian astrology, pp. 98–9; Ramesey, Restaurata, pp. 90–1.

57 Jeffery Neve, Almanacke (1606), sigs. [C]v–C2r; Richard Allestree, Almanacke (1618), sigs. [A]–A3v.

58 For example, John Gadbury, Collectio geniturarum (1660), pp. 12–13, corrected what he thought common errors in Queen Elizabeth's nativity (with Gadbury's almanacs for 1666 and 1669). See also, and compare, John Partridge's Defectio geniturarum (1697), epistle to reader, pp. 275–6, and his Opus reformatum (1693), pp. iv–xi, 52–4; Ramesey, Restaurata, pp. 2–4 (preface); Robert Godson, Astrologia reformata (1696), pp. 1–14.

59 Geneva, Astrology, pp. 151–74, provides the most succinct summary of genethliacal practice.

60 John Gadbury, Genethlialogia (1661 edn, first published 1658), title-page and p. 45.

61 John Partridge, Mikropanastron (1679), pp. 11–12.

62 Ramesey, Restaurata, p. 91.

63 Salmon, Horae, p. 67.

64 Samuel Jeake, ‘Animadversiones genethliacae’, 1672, Rye Castle Museum, Selmes MS 35, p. 5. Jeake undertook similar evaluations on several occasions, including when he factored his wife's geniture in ‘The nativity of Elisabeth’, 1685–6, Rye Castle Museum, Selmes MS 53(1), p. 27.

65 Ramesey, Restaurata, pp. 160ff; Gadbury, Genethlialogia, pp. 53ff. Physical limitations, such as stammering, and predilections, like lying, were also explained in these terms. For instance, Coley, Clavis, p. 548; Lilly, Anima, appendix (aphorisms from Cardan, pp. 7–9).

66 Josten, Ashmole, ii, pp. 547, 559, 576, 606, 640.

67 Lilly, Christian astrology, p. 54, and also n. 65.

68 For summaries of the techniques used in criminal detection, see Lilly, Christian astrology, pp. 331–66; Ramesey, Restaurata, pp. 184–5; John Russell, A coelestiall prospect … for the year (1661), sigs. [C4]r–[C5]r; Gadbury, Genethlialogia, pp. 279–83; William Eland, A tutor to astrologie (1657, 6th edn, 1670), pp. 84–6; Coley, Clavis, pp. 209–18; Middleton, Practical astrology, pp. 234–42; Partridge, Mikropanastron, pp. 68–70.

69 Coley, Clavis, pp. 552–4; Gadbury, Genethlialogia, pp. 132–9.

70 Lilly, Christian astrology, pp. 385–8; Gadbury, Genethlialogia, p. 56.

71 Lilly, Christian astrology, pp. 385ff, gives several examples which support this, or evidence of the services offered by practitioners in Anon., An elegy on the death of Dr. Thomas Saffold (1691).

72 For an instructive account of medieval astrology and the question of generation, see Darrel Rutkin, ‘Astrology, natural philosophy and the history of science, c. 1250–1700: studies toward an interpretation of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana, 2002), pp. 36–103.

73 Partridge, Mikropanastron, pp. 84–5, 98–103; Edwards, Cometomantia, 220–7; John Case, The angelical guide shewing men and women their lott or chance in this elementary life (1697), pp. 60–9.

74 Capp, Bernard, Astrology and the popular press: English almanacs, 1500–1800 (London, 1979), pp. 117–22Google Scholar; Curth, Louise, English almanacs, astrology and popular medicine, 1550–1700 (Manchester, 2007)Google Scholar.

75 For instance, Ramesey, Restaurata, pp. 152–3; Sarah Jinner, Almanack (1659: Wing A1845), sig. Bv, who refers her readers to Lemnius, Secret miracles of nature, pp. 20–1, 306; James Wolveridge, Speculum matricis (1670), 20–1.

76 Dorothy Partridge, The woman's almanack (1694), sig. Av.

77 See, for example, Jacques Gaffarel (trans. Edmund Chilmead), Unheard-of curiosities concerning the talismanical sculpture of the Persians (1650), pp. 60–246; Israel Hiebner (trans. B. Clayton), Mysterium sigillorum, herbarum & lapidum containing a compleat cure of all sicknesses and diseases of mind and body by means of the influences of the seven planets (1698), pp. 188–90; [Elias Ashmole], ‘Miscellany’, c. 1680, British Library, Sloane MS 3822, passim, for material derived from Forman's records.

78 Lilly, Christian astrology, p. 318.

79 John White, Almanacke (1615), sig. C; Turner, Thomas, Almanack (Cambridge, 1633)Google Scholar, sig. [C4]r; William Dade, Country-man's kalendar (1700), unpaginated. Almanacs like Dade's offered the same sort of advice year on year, effectively branding theirs as a particular kind of almanac. Readers, in turn, used almanacs to keep records of animal breeding and plant cuttings. See, for instance, George Wharton, Calendarium Carolinum (1666), sig. B2r, University of Illinois Library copy, Wing A2657; Sir John Nicholas in Thomas Gallen, Almanack (1668), interleaving between sigs. B4–B5, Folger Shakespeare Library, V.a.419–20; idem, in Thomas Gallen, Almanack (1673), sig. [B]r, British Library, Additional MS 41202(J), Wing A1790A; Sarah Sale in Riders British Merlin (1680), interleavings between sigs. B4–[B6], Folger Shakespeare Library, A2254.5.

80 Samuel Jeake, ‘Astrological experiments exemplified’, c. 1688–92, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, MS 1959.005, p. 101; Hunter and Gregory, eds., Astrological diary, pp. 106, 155, 174, 239.

81 See the endpapers of John Norgate's family Bible, c. 1615–36, Norfolk Record Office, MC 175/1/1–4; Isabella Twysden's diary, 1647, British Library, Additional MS 34169, fo. 28r, kept in that year's almanac from John Booker, Mercurius coelicus; A. Howe's reading and use of Richard Saunders, ‘Transcripts from Physiognomie, chiromancie and metoposcopie’, c.1675–1700, Wellcome Library, MS 4370, natal horoscopes appended. Almanac birth records include Arthur Hopton, Almanacke … to the meridian and latitude of the ancient shiretowne of Shrewsbury (1613), sigs. [A5]r–[A8]r, Bodleian Library copy, Ashmole MS 66; Richard Allestree, Almanack … calculated and properly referred, to the longitude and sublimitie … Derby (1620), sig. Br, Bodleian Library copy, STC 407; John Kinde, Almanacke … for the meridian of the famous city of Yorke (1625), sigs. [A5]r–[A8]r, Newberry Library copy, STC 469.9; Pond, Edward, A new prognostication … for the auncient burrough towne of Stanford (Cambridge, 1626)Google Scholar, endpapers, Bodleian Library copy, STC 501.16; John Booker, Almanack (1640), interleaving between sigs. [A]4–[A]5, Bodleian Library copy, STC 419.9; Cardanus Rider, Brittish Merlin (1658), passim, British Library copy, P. P. 2469.b; John Goldsmith, Almanack (1695), flyleaf, Bodleian Library copy, Wing A1799. Cf. Salmon, Horae, 225–7.

82 Glennie, Paul and Thrift, Nigel, Shaping the day: a history of timekeeping in England and Wales 1300–1800 (Oxford, 2009), esp. pp. 269–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83 Smyth, Adam, Autobiography in early modern England (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 15–56Google Scholar.

84 Parish register, St. Thomas, Dudley Archives and Local History Service, located courtesy of C. D. Gilbert, ‘Smith, Samuel (1584–1665)’, Oxford dictionary of national biography.

85 Wilson, Douglas, ed., The register of the parish church of St. Mary, Todmorden: baptisms, 1670–1780, marriages, 1669–1780, burials, 1666–1780 (Leyland, 1978), p. 6Google Scholar.

86 For instance, Partridge, Defectio, p. 200, where he disputes another astrologer's accuracy because the horoscope did not match what Partridge knew of its subject's physique.

87 Christopher Heydon, A defence of judiciall astrologie in answer to a treatise lately published by Mr. John Chamber (1603), pp. 129–30; Coley, Clavis, pp. 443–4 (and aphorisms in ‘his’ 1714 and 1715 almanacs, Merlinus anglicus junior); Lilly, Anima, appendix, p. 6. Understandably, critics registered this debate too: J. S., The starr-prophet anatomiz'd & dissected (1675), pp. 4ff; John Brinley, A discourse proving by scripture & reason and the best authors, ancient and modern, that there are witches…and likewise the use and abuse of astrology laid open (1686), pp. 116–17.

88 Arthur Dee, ‘Miscellany’, c. 1600–1650, British Library, Sloane MS 1902, fo. 10v.

89 Heydon, Defence, pp. 85, 101–6, 155–7, 163, 318–21, 531–2; Coley, Clavis, pp. 632–3. See Baumbach, Sibylle, Shakespeare and the art of physiognomy (Penrith, 2008), pp. 98–124Google Scholar.

90 Lilly, Christian astrology, pp. 500–1, registers this debate; Partridge, Mikropanastron, p. 313; J[ohn] B[utler], Hagiastrologia, pp. 68–70; Edwards, Cometomantia, pp. 250–5.

91 Instances of these terms include Heydon, Defence, p. 106; Nicholas Culpeper, Opus astrologicum (1654), sig. Bv; Augur Ferrier (trans. Thomas Kelway), A learned astronomicall discourse of the judgement of nativities (1593; 2nd edn, 1642), p. 64; Knight, Vox stellarum, p. 42; Coley, Clavis, p. 20; Job Gadbury, Ephemeris (1710), sig. C3vff.

92 Jeake, ‘Astrological experiments exemplified’, p. 102.

93 Coley, Clavis, p. 140. Similar assumptions are evident from Heydon, Defence, pp. 149–52; Lilly, Christian astrology, p. 55; Ramesey, Restaurata, pp. 19–20. In circuitous fashion, celestial influences were considered to have relatively greater effect on geographical locations with which they shared natural sympathy. See Golinski, Jan, British weather and the climate of Enlightenment (Chicago, IL, 2007), pp. 99–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

94 Lilly, Anima, pp. 101–4.

95 For links between natal inclination, humoral temperament, and one's vocation in life, see Gadbury, Genethlialogia, pp. 109–10; Partridge, Mikropanastron, pp. 108–10; William Dade, Country man's kalender (1685), sigs. [A8]v–Br.

96 Richard Gibson, Astrologus Britannicus (1710), sig. Av; Chapman, Alison, ‘Marking time: astrology, almanacs, and English Protestantism’, Renaissance Quarterly, 60 (2007), pp. 1257–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cameron, Euan, Enchanted Europe: superstition, reason, and religion, 1250–1750 (Oxford, 2010), pp. 187–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

97 Curry, Prophecy, pp. 10–11.

98 As Aquinas's proverb had it, the stars inclined but did not compel, or a Ptolemaic maxim spoke of the wise man overcoming the stars. See Jonathan Dove, Speculum anni (Cambridge, 1653 for 1654), sigs. B6vff; John Tanner, Angelus Britannicus (1666), title-page; Henry Coley, Nuncius coelestis (1683), rubrics; Fowle, Speculum (1700), sig. [B]v. Compare the notion that the stars ruled men but God ruled the stars: Daniel Browne, Almanacke (1629), title-page; Thomas Langley, Almanack (1637), sig. C4r; Blagrave, Ephemeris (1660), sigs. A3ff.

99 Thomas Tryon, Some memoirs of the life of Mr. Thomas Tryon, late of London, merchant (1705), pp. 23–4.

100 Ramesey, Restaurata, p. 6.

101 Partridge, Mikropanastron, sig. [A8]r–v.

102 George Atwell, An apology, or, defence of the divine art of natural astrologie (1660), pp. 30–1; [Henry Coley], Merlinus Anglicus junior (1706), sigs. B4vff.

103 Jeake, ‘Nativity’, Selmes MS 53(1), p. 29.

104 Kirby, Diurnal speculum, sig. A3r. Kirby seems to have borrowed this saw from Lilly in whose 1644 almanac it appears. See too Henry Crawford, Vox uraniae (1676), sig. A2r.

105 Examples of such claims include Partridge, Mikropanastron, pp. 305–6.

106 Thomas Browne, Religio medici (1642), pp. 149–50.

107 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Eleventh report: appendix, part vii (London, 1888), pp. 86–8Google Scholar; Williamson, George, ed., Lady Anne Clifford: countess of Dorset, Pembroke & Montgomery, 1590–1676: her life, letters and work (Kendal, 1922), p. 58Google Scholar.

108 See Bamborough, J. B., ‘Robert Burton's astrological notebook’, Review of English Studies, 32 (1981), pp. 267–85Google Scholar.

109 Gómez, Nicolás Wey, The tropics of empire: why Columbus sailed south (Cambridge, MA, 2008), pp. xiiiGoogle Scholar, 66.

110 William Jackson, ‘Relation’, 1642, British Library, Sloane MS 793/894, pp. 1–3. Cf. Harlow, Vincent, ed., The voyages of captain William Jackson (London, Camden miscellany, xiii, 1923)Google Scholar.

111 William Dampier, ‘Voyages through the South Seas’, c. 1700, British Library, Sloane MS 3236, fo. 81.

112 Edward Maynard, ‘Collections’, c. 1667–72, British Library, Sloane MS 1426, fos. 65–75.

113 Richard Browne to Sir Joseph Williamson, 28 Sept. 1672, in Sainsbury, William, ed., Calendar of state papers colonial, America and West Indies (London, 1860–1994)Google Scholar, vii, p. 416. See also Atkins, Samuel, Kalendarium Pennsilvaninse (Philadelphia, PA, 1686)Google Scholar, and Danforth, Samuel, New England almanack (Cambridge, MA, 1686)Google Scholar.

114 Henry Coley, Nuncius coelestis (1679), sigs. C2v–C6r.

115 Dove, Jonathan, Speculum anni (Cambridge, 1679)Google Scholar, sig. Cv.

116 John Booker, A bloody Irish almanack (1646), title-page and pp. 24ff.

117 For instance, John Gadbury, Ephemeris (1695).

118 For instance, Earle, Rebecca, ‘“If you eat their food … ”: diets and bodies in early colonial Spanish America’, American Historical Review, 115 (2010), pp. 688–713CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

119 Compare Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia epidemica (1646, 6th edn, 1672), pp. 370ff; Jordan, Winthrop, White over black: American attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1968), pp. 13–19Google Scholar.

120 Sarah Jinner, Womans almanac (1659), sigs. A6v–A7r; Saunders, Physiognomie, pp. 257ff; William Lilly, Mirror of natural astrology (?1675), pp. 5–8; Anon., The art of courtship (1686), sigs. B2v–B3v; J. S., The true fortune-teller (1698), pp. 74–100; Anon., Aristotle's legacy (1699), p. 18.

121 Samuel Jeake, ‘Diapason. The harmony of the signes of Heaven’, 1672, Rye Castle Museum, Selmes MS 34, p. 53.

122 See Verbeke, Demmy, ‘Swag-bellied Hollanders and dead-drunk Almaines: reputation and pseudo-translation in early modern England’, Dutch Crossing, 34 (2010), pp. 182–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

123 Tabular summaries found in almanacs are telling of this drive to social taxonomy. See Claude Dariot (trans. F. W.), A briefe and most easie introduction to the astrologicall judgement of the starres (1598); John Napier, The bloudy almanack for this present jubilee (1647), title (verso); Anon., Almanack (Aberdeen, 1666), sig. B4r; Thomas Trigge, Calendarium astrologicum (1681), sig. A2r. English astrologers were not alone in their typological practice. See Esguerra, Jorge, ‘New world, new stars: patriotic astrology and the invention of Indian and Creole bodies in colonial Spanish America, 1600–1650’, American Historical Review, 104 (1999), pp. 33–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Azzolini, Monica, ‘Refining the astrologer's art: astrological diagrams in Bodleian MS Canon. misc. 24 and Cardano's Libelli quinque (1547)’, Journal for the History of Astronomy, 42, 1 (2011), pp. 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.