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History of Science2017, Vol. 55(2) 187 –209

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Astrology in court: The Spanish Inquisition, authority, and expertise

Tayra M. C. Lanuza-NavarroThe Huntington Library, USA

AbstractAstrology, its legitimacy, and the limits of its acceptable practice were debated in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Many of the related arguments were mediated by the work of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and the responses to it. Acknowledging the complexities of the relationship between astrological ideas and Christian teachings, this paper focuses on the Catholic debates by specifically considering the decisions about astrology taken by the Spanish Inquisition. The trials of astrologers are examined with the aim of understanding the role of experts in astrology in early modern Spain. This study brings into view the specific nature of the debate on astrology in Spain, the consequences of the actions of the Inquisition and the social control it exerted. The historical events discussed comprise a particular case and also mirror the general debates about astrology taking place in early modern Europe. The experts’ opinions expressed in trials and in reports about the discipline received by the Inquisition reveal two key traits of the debate: the dispute about who had the authority to decide on the legitimacy of astrology and the disagreement about what constituted natural and judicial astrological practices. These led to different opinions about what was to be done with each defendant and about what content in their books ought to be forbidden.

KeywordsAstrology, expertise, authority, theologians, physicians, trials, Spanish Inquisition

Introduction

The study of the role of experts in early modern inquisitorial and legal trials has proved fruitful in many ways. It has highlighted, for example, the intellectual tools physicians used to establish their authority, illuminated how the concept of illness was negotiated,

Corresponding author:Tayra M. C. Lanuza-Navarro, The Huntington Library, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, CA 91108, USA.Email: [email protected]

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1. See Silvia De Renzi, “Medical Expertise, Bodies, and the Law in Early Modern Courts,” Isis 98 (2007): 315–22; Silvia De Renzi, “The Risks of Childbirth: Physicians, Finance, and Women’s Deaths in the Law Courts of Seventeenth-Century Rome,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 84 (2010): 549–77; Silvia De Renzi, “Witnesses of the Body. Medico-Legal Cases in Seventeenth-Century Rome,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 33(A) (2002): 219–42; Gianna Pomata, Contracting a Cure: Patients, Healers, and the Law in Early Modern Bologna (Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Gianna Pomata, “Malpighi and the Holy Body: Medical Experts and Miraculous Evidence in Seventeenth-Century Italy,” Renaissance Studies 21(4) (2007): 568–86; Harold Cook, Trials of an Ordinary Doctor: Joannes Groenevelt in Seventeenth-Century London (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); David C. Gentilcore, “The Protomedicato Tribunals and Health in Italian Cities, 1600–1800: A Comparison,” in Eugenio Sonnino (ed.) Living in the City (14th–20th Centuries) (Rome: Casa Ed. Univ. La Sapienza, 2004), pp.407–30. See also Carmel Ferragud, “Expert Examination of Wounds in the Criminal Court of Justice in Cocentaina (Kingdom of Valencia) During the Late Middle Ages,” in Wendy J. Turner and Sara M. Butler (eds.) Medicine and the Law in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp.109–32; Carmel Ferragud, “Los peritajes médicos en la Valencia bajomedieval: los casos de envenenamiento,” Dynamis 36(1) (2016): 119–41; and Andrée Countermanche, “The Judge, the Doctor, and the Poisoner: Medical Expertise in Manosquin Judicial Rituals at the End of the Fourteenth Century,” in Joëlle Rollo-Koster (ed.) Medieval and Early Modern Ritual. Formalized Behavior in Europe, China and Japan (Leiden; Boston, MA; Colonia: Brill, 2002), pp.105–23.

2. Recent historiography of the nature of expertise in science, of the self versus public construc-tion of the figure of the expert and its public reception, as well as about the creation and social understanding of the idea of expert knowledge, particularly since Shapin and Shaffer’s Leviathan (1985), has insisted that expertise must be understood as something acquired and deployed within particular political, historical, and cultural contexts. See Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). For studies on expertise from sociology of science, see Sheila Jasanoff, “Breaking the Waves in Science Studies Comment on H. M. Collins and Robert Evans, The Third Wave of Science Studies,” Social Studies of Science 33(3) (2003): 389–400; also, Arie Rip, “Constructing Expertise in a Third Wave of Science Studies,” Social Studies of Science 33(3) (2003): 419–34, both in discussion with Collins and Evans. See H. M. Collins and R. Evans, “The Third Wave of Science Studies. Studies of Expertise and Experience,” Social Studies of Science 32(2) (2002): 235–96. For the consider-ation of expertise in seventeenth-century science, see Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience. The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1995). For a specific case of an astrologer claiming expertise in the sixteenth century in the very different context of a royal court, see Darin Hayton, “Expertise ex Stellis Comets, Horoscopes, and Politics in Renaissance Hungary,” Osiris 25 (2010): 27–46.

and probed early modern perceptions of the natural and the supernatural in sickness.1 Furthermore, it has spurred larger studies about scientific expertise in the early modern period. This article focuses on the role of the expert in early modern Spain, in particular the Inquisition’s use of astrologers both as consultants during trials and as judges of pub-lished books.2 The Inquisition’s decisions concerning astrology led to a broader debate about the sort of scholarly experience necessary for an expert witness on astrology in

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3. It was the Council of Castile, the institution that since the 1550s controlled printing censor-ship, that approved works for publication and gave licenses, which had been unofficially in the hands of the Inquisition from 1478. Inquisitorial censorship was exerted a posteriori, on printed works starting in 1554. On civil and inquisitorial literary censorship, laws, and mech-anisms, see Virgilio Pinto Crespo, Inquisición y control ideológico en la España del siglo XVI (Madrid: Taurus, 1983); Antonio Márquez, Literatura e Inquisición en España, (Madrid: Taurus, 1980); Virgilio Pinto Crespo, “Thought Control in Spain,” in Stephen Haliczer (ed.) Inquisition and Society in Early Modern Europe (London: Croom Helm, 1987), pp.171–188; Amparo García Cuadrado, “Aproximación a los criterios legales en materia de imprenta durante la Edad Moderna en España,” Revista General de Información y Documentación 6(2) (1996): 125–87; Fernando Bouza, Papeles y opinión: políticas de publicación en el Siglo de Oro (Madrid: CSIC, 2008); P. Bohigas, El libro Español (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1962); J. Martínez de Sousa, Pequeña historia del libro (Barcelona: Labor, 1987); H. Escolar, Historia universal del libro (Madrid: Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez, 1993); Jaime Moll, De la imprenta al lector. Estudios sobre el libro español del siglo XVI al XVIII (Madrid: Arco-Libros, 1994); Jaime Moll, “Problemas bibliográficos del libro del Siglo de Oro,” Boletín de la Real Academia Española 59 (1979): 49–107.

4. See Ricardo García Cárcel and Doris Moreno Martínez, Inquisición. Historia crítica (Madrid: Temas de hoy, 2000), pp.31–46; also, Francisco Tomás y Valiente, “Relaciones de la Inquisición con el aparato institucional del Estado,” in J. Pérez Villanueva (ed.) La Inquisición Española. Nueva visión, nuevos horizontes (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1980), pp.41–61.

5. For arguments in other contexts that Spanish arguments mirror, see Ugo Baldini, “The Roman Inquisition’s Condemnation of Astrology. Antecedents, Reasons and Consequences,” in G. Fragnito (ed.) Church, Censorship, and Culture in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp.79–110; Bernard Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press. English Almanacs, 1500–1800 (London; Boston: Brill, 1979), pp.131–79; John D. North, Astronomy and Cosmology (London: Fontana Press, 1994), pp.265–6 and 271–8; Eugenio Garin, Astrology in the Renaissance: The Zodiac of Life (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1983); Germana Ernst, “Astrology in Counter-Reformation Rome,” in Stephen Pumfrey, Paolo Rossi and Michael Slawinski (eds.) Science, Culture and Popular Belief in Renaissance Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), pp.249–73. See also A. Long, “Astrology: Arguments Pro and Contra,” in J. Barnes, J. Brunschwig, M. Burnyeat and M. Schofield (eds.) Science and Speculation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp.165–92.

inquisitorial trials.3 This debate is evident not only in the documents related to the prepa-ration of the catalogues of prohibited and expurgated books, as has previously been said, but also in the inquisitorial trial records.

During the time of the inquisitorial trials, a debate developed concerning who was entitled to make decisions about the nature of astrology and about whether or not the practice of astrology should be permitted. Within a trial, the opposing sides would dis-cuss the experience and background necessary to qualify a scholar as an expert, or authority, in the subject. The arguments between the critics and the defenders of astrol-ogy reveal telling aspects of the early modern debates surrounding the practice of astrol-ogy. The particular nature of the Spanish Inquisition, an institution not just of theological but also of social control active in the different kingdoms of the Spanish Monarchy,4 determined the way the broader discussion on the practice of astrology evolved in Spain.

This study considers how debates surrounding inquisitorial trials, though evolving in a specific context, often mirrored the general debates about astrology taking place in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.5 The arguments used in defense of astrology


6. The Black Legend is defined as the stereotypical depiction of early modern Spain as ignorant, fanatical, and backward, particularly in science. For a study of the origins and history of the term, see Víctor Navarro Brotons and William Eamon, “Spain and the Scientific Revolution: Historiographical Questions and Conjectures,” in Víctor Navarro Brotons and William Eamon (eds.) Más allá de la Leyenda Negra: España y la Revolución Científica [Beyond the Black Legend: Spain and the Scientific Revolution] (Valencia: Instituto de Historia de la Ciencia y Documentación López Piñero, 2007), pp.27–38. See also William Eamon, “Nuestros males no son constitucionales, sino circunstanciales: The Black Legend and the History of Early Modern Spanish Science,” The Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies 7 (2009): 13–30; Víctor Navarro Brotons, “España y la revolución científica: aspectos historiográficos, reflexiones y perspectivas,” in Víctor Navarro Brotons, Disciplinas, saberes y prácticas. Filosofía nat-ural, matemáticas y astronomía en la sociedad española de la época moderna (Valencia: Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2014), pp.19–36; William Eamon, “Epilogue. The Difference That Made Spain, the Difference That Spain Made,” in John Slater, Maríaluz López-Terrada and José Pardo-Tomás (eds.) Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp.231–43. See also Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “Iberian Science in the Renaissance: Ignored How Much Longer,” Perspectives on Science 12 (2004): 86–125; Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire and Nation. Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).

7. The so-called ‘polemic of Spanish science’ was a debate about the existence of scientific activity in Spain in the seventeenth century (and later on) and about the (lack of) a national contribution to the Scientific Revolution, initiated at the end of the eighteenth century, which continued until the second half of the twentieth century. This debate was tainted by ideologi-cal, nationalistic, and religious positions. “A sterile and meaningless debate” are the words

and those used to criticize it in the context of the Spanish Inquisition’s courts share fea-tures with the arguments used in other European contexts. The aim of this article is to focus on the debates on expertise and authority as they developed in early modern Spain as a specific aspect of scientific activity. It does so while refusing to frame the historical questions that arise in the study within some historiographical constructions that have often been used in studies of science in Spain, such as Spain’s role in the Scientific Revolution, or that have reduced the relationship between science and religion in early modern Spain to the issue of science versus the Spanish Inquisition or of science versus magic and astrology. This article assumes that, historiographically, we are beyond inter-preting early modern Spanish science through the misleading lens of the Black or the Green legends, as well as beyond interpreting early modern science according to the aforementioned confrontations.

Beyond the old frameworks

In the decade after Víctor Navarro Brotons and William Eamon questioned the so-called Black Legend, and with it the customary place of Iberian science in the Scientific Revolution, these two authors insisted on the need for new questions and perspectives.6 A few things are now clear. Endlessly rehashing the polemic of Spanish science and the presence or absence of elements of the new science in Spain resulted in “a sterile and meaningless debate” with little relevance to current historiography, some of which ques-tions the very concept of the Scientific Revolution.7 These debates were abandoned long

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of López Piñero on the polemic, in José María López Piñero, Ciencia y técnica en la sociedad española de los siglo XVI y XVII (Barcelona: Labor, 1979), pp.20–2. See also the Introduction in José Pardo-Tomás, Ciencia y censura. La inquisición española y los libros científicos en los siglos XVI y XVII (Madrid: CSIC, 1991); and Agustí Nieto Galán, in Kostas Gavroglu (ed.), The Sciences in the European Periphery During the Enlightenment (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), pp.73–94. Some authors have tried to add a shade of meaning to this radical assertion pointing out that, despite the ideologically charged positions in the polemic, some authors succeeded in contributing with a few valuable resources to the scientific activity in early modern Spain. See Víctor Navarro Brotons, “Menéndez Pelayo. Legado y actualidad de sus trabajos sobre la actividad científica en la historia hispánica,” in Menéndez Pelayo. Cien años después (Madrid: Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo (UIMP), 2012), pp.245–56. See also Leoncio López Ocón, “Ciencia e historia de la ciencia en el Sexenio democrático: la formación de una tercera vía en la polémica de la ciencia española,” Dynamis 12 (1992): 87–103.

8. Navarro Brotons and Eamon, “Spain and the Scientific Revolution,” p.9. 9. See Maria Portuondo, Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (Chicago,

IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006); Nicolas Wey Gómez, The Tropics of Empire. Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009); Daniela Bleichmar, Paula DeVos, Kristin Huffine and Kevin Sheehan (eds.), Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Cañizares-Esquerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation; James Delburgo and Nicholas Dew (eds.), Science and Empire in the Atlantic World. New Directions in American History (New York: Routledge 2007); Ralph Bauer, The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Ricardo Padrón, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain (Chicago. IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Harold J. Cook and Timothy D. Walker, “Circulation of Medicine in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” Social History of Medicine 26(3) (2013): 337–51.

10. Some historians have recently pointed out that falling on the opposite side of the scale of the historiography that ignored Iberian science and its role in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that is, attributing the origins of the new science to the Iberian enterprises (only), is also too extreme. See John Gascoigne, “Crossing the Pillars of Hercules: Francis Bacon, the Scientific Revolution and the New World,” in Ofer Gal and Raz Che-Morris (eds.) Science in the Age of Baroque (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), pp.217–38.

ago by historians of early modern Spanish science, as the work of Lopez-Piñero and that of many later historians makes clear in what Navarro and Eamon called “a post-López-Piñero era of scholarship in the history of Iberian science.”8 In the last decades, various aspects of early modern Spanish and Portuguese science have been the object of scholar-ship not mediated by the old polemic. Recent studies of science and empire have been particularly prolific and significant.9 These studies have highlighted the development of several aspects of science derived from Iberian enterprises aimed at controlling knowl-edge of the New World, such as the validation of personal experience as a source of knowledge or the institutional organization of science at the service of the state with an emphasis on empirical knowledge.10


11. For a recent reappraisal of the subject of the polemic and Inquisition and science in Spain, see Víctor Navarro Brotons, “La polémica sobre la Inquisición y la ciencia en la España moderna. Consideraciones historiográficas y estado actual de la cuestión,” in Ugo Baldini, La polemica europea sull’Inquisizione (Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2015), pp.123–44.

12. Pardo-Tomás, Ciencia y censura, p.16. On the same subject, see also Henry Kamen, “Censura y libertad: El impacto de la Inquisición sobre la cultura española,” Revista de la Inquisición 7 (1998): 109–17.

13. José Pardo-Tomás, “Censura inquisitorial y lectura de libros científicos. Una propuesta de replanteamiento,” Tiempos Modernos 9 (2003–4): pp.1–18.

14. A recent work of this kind on the Roman Inquisition and science is Ugo Baldini and Leen Spruit, Catholic Church and Modern Science: Documents from the Archives of the Roman Congregations of the Holy Office and the Index (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2009). See also Ugo Baldini, “L’Inquisizione romana e le scienze: etica, ideologia, storia,” in A. Borromeo (ed.) L’Inquisizione (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2003), pp.661–707; Baldini, “The Roman Inquisition’s condemnation of astrology.”

15. On the nineteenth-century origins of the “conflict thesis” regarding science and religion, and how it was initiated by the scholars John Draper and Andrew White, and discussed after-wards, see the Introduction in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (eds.), God and Nature. Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1986), pp.1–18.

16. Lindberg and Numbers, God and Nature, p.12. Also, Ronald L. Numbers, “Introduction,” in Ronald L. Numbers (ed.) Galileo Goes to Jail and other Myths about Science and Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp.1–7; David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, “Beyond War and Peace: A Reappraisal of the Encounter between Science

One of the essential elements which could help overcome lingering traces of the polemic of Spanish science in the general historiography is explaining the influence of the Inquisition on scientific activity in Iberian, and more specifically Spanish, territories.11 In his seminal work on science and censorship, José Pardo-Tomás questioned whether the sterile, old polemic had inhibited specialists and contributed to the scarcity of rigor-ous studies on the relationship between science and the Inquisition in Spain.12 Yet, even setting aside that polemic – as Pardo-Tomás did when considering the debate about Inquisition and science – has not changed the situation much.13 Studies on the Inquisition often rely on a superficial reading of the Indexes of Prohibited Books when dealing with the censorship of scientific works, especially astrological works. Pardo-Tomás’ work remains the only one that undertakes a systematic study of the documents related to cen-sorship of scientific works in Spain and seeks to understand the typology of the censor-ship, the way the Indexes were prepared, the circumstances surrounding each case, as well as the efficiency and efficacy of those prohibitions or expurgations.14

Historical studies of science and the Spanish Inquisition seem to consistently struggle to overcome misleading assumptions about the relationship between Spanish science and the Inquisition in a manner reminiscent of the traditional idea of conflict between science and religion. The historiographical defeat of the polemic of Spanish science parallels the efforts made by historians of science to go beyond the traditional idea of conflict between science and religion and the so-called conflict thesis or warfare thesis.15 David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers have shown on several occasions that the interactions between Christianity and science were complex and not reducible to simple conflict.16 The studies

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and Religion,” Church History 55 (1986): pp.338–54; Ronald L. Numbers, “Aggressors, Victims, and Peacemakers: Historical Actors in the Drama of Science and Religion,” in Harold Attridge (ed.) The Religion and Science Debate: Why Does It Continue? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), pp.15–54. See also James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies. A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America 1870–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

17. In the words of Margaret Jacob, “The importance of early modern European science and the state of the field,” Isis 98 (2007): 361–5; review of K. Park and L. Daston (eds.) The Cambridge History of Science. Volume 3: Early Modern Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

18. Works of previous historiographical periods by authors like Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929–58); Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic. Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973); John North, Horoscopes and History (London: Warburg Institute, 1989); Ernst, “Astrology in Counter-Reformation Rome”; Germana Ernst, Religione, ragione e natura. Ricerche su Tommaso Campanella nel tardo Rinascimento (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1991); Garin, Astrology in the Renaissance; Paola Zambelli, The Speculum Astronomiae and its Enigma (Dordrecht; Boston, MA; London: Kluwer, 1992); Paola Zambelli (ed.), Astrology Hallucinati: Stars and the End of the World in Luther’s Time (Berlin, 1986); Patrick Curry (ed.). Astrology, Science and Society: Historical Essays (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1987); Patrick Curry, Prophecy and Power. Astrology in Early Modern England (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989) had already pointed out the role of astrology and the need to understand early modern approaches to nature without neglecting it. Also, Laura Ackerman Smoller, History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The Christian Astrology of Pierre D’Ailly, 1350–1420 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Ornella Pompeo Faracovi (ed.), Lo Specchio Alto: Astrologia e filosofia fra medioevo e prima età moderna (Pisa: Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2012); G. Ernst and G. Giglioni, Il linguaggio dei cieli (Rome: Carocci, 2012), pp.73–89.

19. As evidenced by the works of William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature. Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Steven Vanden Broecke, The Limits of Influence. Pico, Louvain and the Crisis of Renaissance Astrology (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2003); 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,” PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 2002; Darrel Rutkin, “Understanding the History of Astrology (and Magic) Accurately: Methodological Reflections on Terminology and Anachronism,”

on the Inquisition and its relationship with intellectual activity can be placed in the con-text of both efforts. Many historians have pointed out how methodologically and histori-cally inaccurate – if not absurd – it is to try to use those old paradigms to understand and interpret either science in the Iberian world during the seventeenth century or the con-frontations of natural philosophers with the Church in the early modern period.

Once liberated from intellectual constructions which invented the dichotomies of sci-ence in opposition to religion or science in opposition to magic,17 new historical works on the early modern study of nature have been enriched by considering many other ele-ments, including astrology.18 Studies on the role of astrology in early modern science and medicine have increased in the past decade.19 Still, there is a great amount of work to be


Philosophical Readings 7(1) (2015): 42–54; Darrel Rutkin, “Astrology and Magic,” Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 38 (2013): 451–505; Monica Azzolini, The Duke and the Stars: Astrology and Politics in Renaissance Milan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Monica Azzolini, “The Political Uses of Astrology: Predicting the Illness and Death of Princes, Kings and Popes in the Italian Renaissance,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C. 41(2) (2010): 135–45; Sheila Rabin, “Kepler’s Attitude Toward Pico and the Anti-Astrology Polemic,” Renaissance Quarterly 50(3) (1997): 750–70; Sheila Rabin, “Kepler’s Astrology and the Physical Universe,” in Richard L. Kremer and J. Włodarczyk (eds.) Johannes Kepler: From Tübingen to Zagan (Warsaw: Institut Historii Nauki PAN, 2009), pp.179–85; Mary Quinlan-McGrath, Influences: Art, Optics, and Astrology in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Patrick J. Boner, Kepler’s Cosmological Synthesis: Astrology, Mechanism and the Soul (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2013); Luis Miguel Nunes Carolino, Ciência, astrologia e sociedade. A teoria da influência celeste em Portugal (1593–1755) (Lisbon: Calouste Gulbenkian; FCT, 2003); Robin B. Barnes, Astrology and Reformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Darin Hayton, The Crown and the Cosmos. Astrology and the Politics of Maximilian I (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015); Robert Westman, The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011).

20. As previously repeated many times by J. M. López Piñero and Víctor Navarro Brotons, among others. See Víctor Navarro Brotons, “La actividad astronómica en la España del siglo XVI: Perspectivas historiográficas,” Arbor 117 (1992): 185–216; Víctor Navarro Brotons, “La ciencia en la España del siglo XVII: el cultivo de las disciplinas físico-matemáticas,” Arbor 153(604–5) (1996): 197–252. On focusing on the actual scientific activity that there was, see also Marialuz López Terrada and John Slater, in this issue.

done on the subject that takes into consideration a variety of social, political, religious, and scientific contexts. The only way to really go beyond misleading, ideologically directed interpretations (Black or Green) is to focus on the actual scientific activity dur-ing that period.20 The present study is situated along this historiographical line.

Authority in astrology

All over Europe, but with differing results in a variety of works, sixteenth-century schol-ars interested in astrology echoed a similar theme: the need for a new, revised, reformed astrology. They furthermore expressed their opinions about the precise way the revision must be carried out. Astronomers, philosophers, theologians, physicians, and astrologers all discussed the subject, determining the parts of astrology that were acceptable and respected human free will and the divine power from those parts that contradicted them.

The debate about the legitimacy of astrology characteristic of the second half of the sixteenth century was particularly acute in Spain. The Spanish Inquisition prosecuted practitioners of astrology and forbade books on the subject following the guidelines that emerged from the Council of Trent. In particular, there was a debate about who were the correct type of experts who could be called upon to issue opinions on the discipline of astrology. Arguments about astrology and astrological experts can be found in a certain type of reports, called memoriales, which were sent to the Inquisition. Beginning in 1583, these reports were requested by the Inquisition for the preparations of the rules that

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21. On the memorials and the Inquisition’s enquiries, see Pardo-Tomás, Ciencia y censura, pp.154–83. The memorials concerning astrology written in the process of preparation of the Indexes were studied by Pardo-Tomás, Ciencia y censura.

22. On the Spanish calculators, see Navarro Brotons, Disciplinas, saberes y prácticas, pp.26–8 and 58–72; W. A. Wallace, “The ‘Calculatores’ in Early Sixteenth-Century Physics,” The British Journal for the History of Science 4 (1969): 221–32; W. A. Wallace, Prelude to Galileo: Essays on Medieval and Sixteenth-Century Sources of Galileo’s Thought (Dordrecht: D. Reidel; Kluwer, 2012), pp.78–90; see also Portuondo, Secret Science, pp.39–41; Antonio Sánchez, “Cosmografía y humanismo en la España del siglo xvi: la Geographia de Ptolomeo y la imagen de América,” Scripta Nova XV(354) (2011) <http://www.ub.es/geocrit/sn/sn-354.htm>. [ISSN: 1138-9788], consulted 27 May 2017.

23. See Cirilo Flórez Miguel, Pablo García Castillo and Roberto Albares Albares, Pedro Sánchez Ciruelo. Una enciclopedia humanística del saber (Salamanca: Caja de Ahorros, 1990).

would serve as guidelines for the publication of the Indexes of prohibited and expurgated books. Pardo-Tomás noted that the debate about experts in astrology was provoked by the institution itself when it undertook these broad enquiries.21 Despite it being quite clear that those consultations provoked a debate in the reports, it was not actually a new debate. Rather, I argue that this was in fact a much older debate which began in the six-teenth century with the Spanish scholar Pedro Sánchez Ciruelo (ca. 1470–ca. 1548).

Ciruelo was a respected member of the Spanish scholarly community whose works were focused on the mathematical disciplines and on theology. He studied at the University of Salamanca for ten years, focusing on mathematics, astronomy, and astrology. He then travelled to Paris, where he studied theology while he taught math-ematics and astrology, and where there had been other members of the group of the Spanish calculatores – originators of the development of mathematical physics in Spanish universities – among them, Juan Martínez Silíceo and Fernán Pérez de Oliva.22 The breadth of his interests is attested by his editions of Thomas Bradwardine’s Aritmetica Speculativa and Geometria Speculativa, a Commentary to the Sphaera of Sacrobosco, a Cursus mathematicarum, several works on logic, his Apotelestmata Astrologiae Christianae in defense of astrology, and a vernacular work on the plague. A work on the conjunction of 1524 is also attributed to him. He added to this later works on Petrus Hispanus’ Summulae and a Confesionario, sermons, epistles, and the famous and many times reprinted Reprobación de las supersticiones y hechicerías.23

Ciruelo’s early works in defense of astrology and his discussion of expertise were part of the disputes about astrology which took place all over Europe at the end of the fif-teenth century. While Ciruelo wrote his main work on the subject in the 1520s, the argu-ments used in the later memoriales inquisitorial reports and also in later trials of practitioners of astrology would echo many of his arguments about who should judge astrological practices and ideas. In what follows, I will describe the position of Pedro Ciruelo on the subject in his work of 1521, consider two reports of 1584 and 1622, and reflect on the participation of experts in trials from 1611 through to the 1690s. These considerations will roughly define the chronological span of the article.

The debate about authority in astrology was already present in works printed at the beginning of the sixteenth century. These works are situated in the context of the responses of scholars to the attack on astrology initiated by the publication of Giovanni

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24. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem (Bologna, 1496; Venice: Bernardinus Venetus de Vitalibus, 1498). See Eugenio Garin (trans. and ed.), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem. Libri I-XII (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1946). See also Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963); Eugenio Garin, L’Umanesimo Italiano. Filosofia e vita civile nel Rinascimento (Bari: Laterza, 1952), pp.119–32; Paola Zambelli, L’apprendista stregone. Astrologia, cabala e arte lulliana in Pico della Mirandola e seguaci (Venice: Saggi Marsilio, 1995).

25. Pedro Sánchez Ciruelo, Apotelesmata Astrologiae Christianae (Alcalá de Henares: G. Brocar, 1521).

26. Lucio Bellanti, Liber de astrologica veritate et In Disputationes Ioannis Pici aduersus astrol-ogos responsiones (Florence: Gherardus de Haerlem, 1498), often referred to as Defensio astrologiae as it was titled in later editions; Giovanni Pontano, De rebus coelestibus (Naples: Sigismundus Mayr, 1512); Agostino Nifo, Ad Apotelesmata Ptolomaei eruditiones (Naples: P.M. De Richis, 1513).

27. Interrogations were the practice involving the construction of the astrological chart represent-ing the moment in which the astrologer was asked a question by the client, which included personal, medical, and business affairs, as well as the location of objects or people. Elections determined the most propitious moment to begin an enterprise or perform an action. Ciruelo describes the acceptable elections as those “natural and corporal,” depending on natural causes: “Electiones bone: Regule eligendi dies et horam ad faciendum ea que sunt pure natu-ralia et corporalia aut saltem artificalia ex rebus naturalibus constantia et ab eis dependentia, sunt … vere et rationabiles … bone et utiles” (Ciruelo, Apotelesmata, Book 4).

28. On Cardano and the reform of astrology, see Anthony Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos. The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp.134–53.

Pico della Mirandola, Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem.24 Pedro Ciruelo’s main work in defense of astrology was titled Apotelesmata Astrologiae Christianae.25 This work, which specifically sought to answer the arguments against astrology published in the Disputationes, was just one of many others across Europe; for instance, those by Lucio Bellanti, Giovanni Pontano, and Agostino Nifo, written with the same aim.26

Ciruelo explicitly organized the Apotelesmata into four books which followed Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos (Latin Quadripartitum), the major treatise that laid down astrolo-gy’s central categories and relations. In the context of the debates about astrology in sixteenth-century Europe, this format signaled a clear stance. It aligned Ciruelo with the opinion of those who based their defense of astrology on the idea that what was once a valid, pristine discipline – as it appeared in Ptolemy’s work – had been corrupted by later medieval, particularly Arab, additions which must be purged in order to restore the true astrology. He considered the astrological practices of interrogations and elections to be Arabic additions, although he defended that there were some elections belonging to natu-ral astrology which were acceptable practices.27 Ciruelo was in this regard one among many scholars with an interest in astrology who proposed such a view. For example, Girolamo Cardano in his 1547 commentary on the Ptolemaic Tetrabiblos argued for the return to a pure Ptolemaic astrology.28

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29. Pedro Sánchez Ciruelo, Uberrimum sphere mundi comentum (Paris: J. Petit, 1498).30. The Centiloquium was a collection of astrological aphorisms attributed to Ptolemy which was

very popular until the sixteenth century. It was considered authentically Ptolemaic despite its inconsistencies with the Tetrabiblos, some of them concerning the astrological practice of interrogations, until Girolamo Cardano denied Ptolemy’s authorship in his Commentary to the Tetrabiblos in 1554. On the Centiloquium and its authorship, see Richard Lemay, “Origin and Success of the Kitab Thamara of Abu Jafar ibn Yusuf ibn Ibrahim: From the Tenth to the Seventeenth Century in the World of Islam and the Latin West,” Proceedings of the First International Symposium for the History of Arabic Science (Aleppo: Institute for the History of Arabic Science, 1978), Vol. 2, pp.91–107. On its contents, see Jean Patrice Boudent, “Astrology between Rational Science and Divine Inspiration. The Pseudo-Ptolemy’s Centiloquium,” in S. Rapisard and E. Niblaeus (eds.) Dialogues Among Books in Medieval Western Magic and Divination (Florence: Sismel-Edizioni del Galluzo, 2014), pp.47–73; J. P. Boudet, “Nature et contre-nature dans l’astrologie médiévale. Le cas du Centiloquium du Pseudo-Ptolémée,” in M. van der Lugt (ed.) La nature comme source de la morale au Moyen Âge (Florence: Sismel-Edizioni del Galluzo, 2014), pp.383–410. Ciruelo explains the parts of astrology he considers genuinely Ptolemaic in the preface of the Uberrimum Sphere mun-dum commentum. A translation of part of it in Flórez Miguel et al., Pedro Sánchez Ciruelo, p.125. See also P. García Castillo, R. Albares Albares and C. Flórez Miguel, La ciencia del cielo: astrología y filosofía natural en la Universidad de Salamanca (Salamanca: Caja de Ahorros, 1989).

31. “Hanc tamen astrologiam multi ut dictum est plura falsa inmiscentes late ampliarum, nam Albumazar, Hali Abenragle, Guydo Bonati (…) et multi alii” (Ciruelo, Uberrimum Sphere mundum, preface, fol. A5r). Albumasar was the way the astrologer Abū Maʿshar Jaʿfar ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar al-Balkhī was known in Western early modern Europe, well known for his works on conjunctions. The Latin translation of his work De magnis coniunctionibus, printed in Venice by E. Ratdolt, was extremely popular in Renaissance Europe. Abenragel was one of the ways early modern authors referred to Abû l-Hasan 'Alî ibn Abî l-Rijâl, the astrologer of the tenth and eleventh century, often cited also as Hali and as Albohazen Ali. His writings were very popular in sixteenth-century Europe, and particularly in Spain due to the thirteenth-century Spanish translation of his work on astrological natal astrology, El libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas, in its later Latin version titled Liber com-pletus in judiciis astrorum. Guido Bonati was the most important Latin astrologer of the thirteenth century and professor at the University of Bologna. His Liber introductorius ad iudicia stellarum, often known as Liber astronomicus, written about 1277, was a compilation from Arabic astrological texts, very popular from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, and often a reference for Renaissance astrological authors. The three authors were included in the Spanish Inquisition’s Index of Prohibited Books in 1632.

Ciruelo had already advanced the idea of the need to reform astrology and return to the Ptolemaic one in a work published twenty years before the Apotelesmata, a commen-tary to Sacrobosco’s Sphere.29 In this work, he argued that Ptolemy’s astrology in the Quadripartitum (and in the Centiloquium), which he still considered genuinely Ptolemaic, was the astrology which must be seen as pure, having not been mixed with false superstitions.30 He explained that later additions had mixed in falsehoods, particularly those of the Persian astrologer Albumasar and his theory of conjunctions, the Arab astrol-oger of the tenth–eleventh centuries Abenragel, and the thirteenth-century Italian astrolo-ger Guido Bonati.31 Then, Ciruelo established this reform of astrology based on a return


32. See Garin, Astrology in the Renaissance; Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos; Vanden Broecke, The Limits of Influence.

33. Pedro Sánchez Ciruelo, Reprobación de supersticiones y hechicerías (1537), and later edi-tions. On the first edition of this work, see Mateo Ripoll, “Sobre una edición ignota de la Reprobación de supersticiones y hechicerías de Pedro Ciruelo,” Dynamis 22 (2002): 437–59.

34. “La verdadera astrología habla de cosas que se causan por las virtudes de los cielos, que con sus movimientos y luces alteran el ayre y la mar, y la tierra, y assí causan diversos effetos de tiempos …, y porque los cielos y las estrellas alterando el ayre y la tierra también alteran a los hombres …, assí los cielos causan a nuestros cuerpos diversas calidades, complexiones, passiones y enfermedades, diversas inclinaciones y abilidades …. Y en estos juicios no hay vanidad ni superstición alguna, porque aplica a los effectos sus causas que tienen virtud natu-ral para los hazer …, y esta astrología es lícita y verdadera sciencia como filosofía natural, o la medicina … La falsa astrología no es arte ni sciencia verdadera, antes es una superstición, porque de los cielos y estrellas presumen de juzgar de cosas que ellas no pueden ser causas dellas …, las cosas de acaescimientos por diversos casos de fortuna … y los secretos del coraçón y voluntad del hombre … [que es] libre” (Ciruelo, Reprobación, fols. 16v–17r).

35. These – good, true, licit versus bad, false, illicit – are the terms used in early modern texts, so all of them are categories of the historical actors.

36. See A. C. Crombie and John D. North, “Roger Bacon,” in Charles C. Gillispie (ed.) Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970–1980), pp.377–85; and Zambelli, The Speculum Astronomiae and its Enigma.

to Ptolemy and an elimination of medieval Arab ideas and of some other astrological contents (like Bonati’s ideas), as the general foundation of his main work in defense of astrology. As has often been pointed out, even the idea of a reformed astrology was based on the traditional distinction between a true astrology and a false, superstitious, intoler-able one.32 This article aims to show that the idea that there existed a true astrology (related to what was broadly defined as natural astrology), and that there was another set of astrological practices that were wrong (classified as judicial astrology) and that was different from that true astrology, became a theme in inquisitorial trials during the fol-lowing century, similarly to how they had been rehearsed in the aforementioned reports.

In his popular work of 1537 titled Reprobación de supersticiones y hechicerías (Reprobation of superstitions and sorceries), Ciruelo defined at length the two kinds of astrology and the difference between them.33 True astrology, he explained, is that which is based on the natural effects caused by the stars on air and water, thus affecting the weather and human health, complexions, and inclinations. False astrol-ogy predicts things related to human free will and chance.34 Establishing the differ-ence between an astrology that was natural – and thus good, true, and licit – and one that was superstitious – and thus bad, false, and illicit – was not an early modern construction.35 It had medieval antecedents, and could be found in the works of Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus.36

The same distinction was also applied to magic, and magic and astrology were on occasion linked, particularly when theologians tried to establish criteria for the condem-nation of illicit practices related to divination. Early modern authors were well acquainted with the works of Marsilio Ficino and Tommaso Campanella, who also referred to the

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37. On Renaissance authors differentiating “good” and “bad” magic, see D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic. From Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, 1958); Ernst, “Astrology in Counter-Reformation”; Ernst, Religione, ragione e natura; Germana Ernst, “Veritatis amor dulcissimus: Aspects of Cardano’s Astrology,” in W. Newman and A. Grafton (eds.) Secrets of Nature. Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2001), pp.39–68.

38. “Purus theologus et qui nulla habet astrologiae principia, valet quicquam in ea iudicando damnare?” (Ciruelo, Apotelesmata, p.2).

39. Ciruelo, Apotelesmata, “Epistola introductoria,” pp.2–3. For instance, after the previously quoted sentence (“purus theologus” etc.), he continues: “Quandoquidem scientiarum errores post principia teste Aristotele cum ratione analetica, ex propriis uniuscuiusque elementis dis-ciplinae di iudicari, convinci et damnari soleant.”

40. “Igitur ille qui fuerit theologus simul et astronomus et utrusque gladium hominus et velut ambidexter poterit rectius et certius astrologica dogmata examinare, et veritates illius doctri-nae (quae religioni christianae subservire possunt) amplius declarare ac confirmare” (Ciruelo, Apotelesmata, p.2).

41. Ciruelo, Apotelesmata, p.3.

difference between good and bad magic.37 Ficino and Campanella were known and cited by Spanish authors like Ciruelo; however, they were not mentioned in the specific trials studied here.

One of the main themes highlighted by Ciruelo – writing long before the Inquisition started its consultations for the Indexes – was his concern that scholars were discussing astrology as if they all had the same knowledge of the subject. Ciruelo insisted in his Apotelesmata Astrologiae Christianae that it was first necessary to establish who had the authority to make decisions concerning the nature of astrology, who was an expert in it, and could judge whether or not it should be permitted. In his introductory letter, Ciruelo complained that only those who met the criteria of being purus theologus (pure theologi-ans) should prevail when judging astrological works.38 The term “pure theologian” was a category used by both astrologers and theologians involved in the polemic about astrol-ogy in Spain. It referred to scholars whose university studies and later works focused on theology, but who had not studied mathematics and astrology beyond the elementary quadrivium. His text indicates that from his point of view, as astrologers and theologians did not receive the same training, their opinions were not equally authoritative on this subject.39 Ciruelo was not the only one to rely on this category. Later on, the authors of some of the reports (the memoriales) would use it in defense of astrology written for the Inquisition (see the following section).

Ciruelo’s idea was that only a person who was both a theologian and an astrologer would be qualified to examine astrological dogma and pass judgment with certainty.40 With little modesty, he explained that he considered himself “iudex aequus fidelis et incorruptus,” that is, the perfect judge for determining what should be considered allow-able Christian astrological doctrine, citing his training both as a theologian (at the univer-sity in Paris) and as an astrologer (at the University of Salamanca).41 Indeed he was taken to be an authority, particularly after he published the aforementioned work in the 1530s, Reprobaciones. This work was addressed to “both secular and religious judges, whose negligence and carelessness” had led, according to him, to the spread of witchcraft and


42. “Esta es una doctrina muy verdadera y cathólica sacada de las entrañas de la más sana the-ología, que disputa contra los errores de las supersticiones y hechicerías que en estos tiempos andan muy públicos en nuestra España, por la negligencia de los señores prelados y de todos los otros juezes, ansí eclesiásticos como seglares” (Ciruelo, Reprobación, 1r).

43. “Tercero capítulo: arguye contra la falsa astrología poniendo differencia entre ella y la otra que es buena sciencia” (Ciruelo, Reprobación, “Table of Contents,” Aiii).

44. Besides his report to the Inquisition defending astrology, nothing else is known so far about Juan Mendoza Porres.

45. “Suplico a Vuestra Señoría lo mande comunicar no con puros teólogos por sí, porque habrán menester comunicación de doctos astrólogos … porque para juzgar de la verdad o falsedad de las otras ciencias ha de argüir de los propios principios de cada una de las ciencias” (Juan de Mendoza Porres, quoted in Pardo-Tomás, Ciencia y censura, p.167).

46. “El juzgar lo que es lícito a solos los teólogos y a puros teólogos pertenece, porque de lo que es lícito no hay reglas en la Astrología sino en la sola Teología” (Juan de Mendoza Porres, document quoted in Pardo-Tomás, Ciencia y censura, p.167). The memorial was previously transcribed by Sagrario Muñoz Calvo, Inquisición y ciencia en la España moderna (Madrid: Nacional, 1977), pp.249–58; and Pinto Crespo, Inquisición, pp.289–91, commented on some aspects of it as well.

47. “Devese consultar con Teólogos de letras, y conciencia, en quien concurran las calidades que para esto se requieren” (It must be consulted with theologians with scholarly training and [religious moral] conscience, who have the qualities required). G. Argüello, Instrucciones del Santo Oficio (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1630), p.27. See Pinto Crespo, Inquisición, pp.41–50.

superstitious practices.42 He then sought to “argue against false astrology, and differenti-ate it from the one that is good science.”43 This formulation seems to have been taken as a standard in inquisitorial trials of astrologers during the seventeenth century. Ciruelo’s Apotelesmata would also be quoted repeatedly in Spanish texts in later debates on astrol-ogy. One example is the report of Juan Mendoza Porres.44

Mendoza’s memorial was one of the reports sent to the Inquisition regarding the Index of Expurgated Books of 1584. It features the same confrontation between theo-logians and astrologers about who was an authority regarding astrology. In this later debate, the dispute was about whether “pure theologians” could have a sufficient knowledge to effectively determine what exactly within astrology should be forbidden. This doubt about whether having theological competence was enough was stated by Mendoza, a supporter of astrology. He begged those responsible for the wording of the rule in the Index to “consult not with pure theologians, because there will be a need for consulting wise astrologers… because to judge about the truth or falseness of the other sciences, one must argue departing from the principles of each one of the sciences.”45 Mendoza is undoubtedly using the category “pure theologian” in the same sense as Ciruelo had several decades before. An advisor or consultant of the Inquisition writing in the margins of Mendoza’s memorial asserted irately: “To judge what is licit only belongs to theologians, and to pure theologians, because there are no rules about what is licit in astrology, but only in theology.”46 The category “pure theologian” was clearly well understood; all the historical actors knew what was meant by it. The Inquisition’s statute established that advisors had to be theologians, and the one in charge of evalu-ating Mendoza’s report was certain that his authority was being challenged.47A few

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48. “Infiero que el que fuere doctor teólogo y astrólogo teniendo la una y otra censura podrá a dos manos vel ud ambi dexter examinar las doctrinas de los astrólogos, porque para juzgar de la verdad o falsedad de las otras ciencias ha de argüir de los propios principios de cada una de las ciencias” (Juan de Mendoza Porres, document quoted in Pardo-Tomás, Ciencia y censura, p.167).

49. Ciruelo’s quote saying the same as Mendoza, in Apotelesmata, p.2 (see note 37).50. See Peter Dear, “Mysteries of State, Mysteries of Nature: Authority, Knowledge, and Expertise

in the Seventeenth Century,” in Sheila Jasanoff, States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order (London; New York: Routledge, 2004), pp.206–24, which includes a discussion of the terms expert and expertise in early modern societies. See also Antonio Barrera-Osorio, “Experts, Nature, and the Making of Atlantic Empiricism,” Osiris 23 (2010): 129–48.

51. Barrera-Osorio, “Experts, Nature, and the Making of Atlantic Empiricism,” pp.132–3.52. De Renzi, “Medical Expertise,” p.318.53. See Erich H. Ash, “Introduction: Expertise and the Early Modern State,” Osiris 25 (2010):

1–24.

lines later, Mendoza wrote, “I infer that a person who is a theologian doctor and an astrologer, with the knowledge of both disciplines will be able to examine the doc-trines of astrologers, because to decide about what is true or false in other sciences it is necessary to argue following the principles of each one of the sciences.”48 This is a nearly literal translation of the passage in Ciruelo’s preface to the Apotelesmata.49 Mendoza even uses the same quote from Augustine’s Doctrina Christi used by Ciruelo to support the assertion.

Clearly, this debate over authority had been initiated in earlier decades in the context of the responses to Pico della Mirandola’s work, such as Ciruelo’s Apotelesmata. The 1584 report featured the same arguments, if not direct non-acknowledged quotes, and subsequent reports followed suit. These arguments would furthermore be employed in discussions about potential experts during the actual trials. In court, there was another main point of debate: the experts’ disagreement about what constituted natural astrology and what constituted the more problematic judicial astrology.

Experts in the trials

The term “expert” had different meanings in early modern societies. It was used to refer to a person with experience in a particular discipline or activity.50 An expert was also one who had knowledge of a craft or profession which came from practice.51 Several scholars have insisted that often, in early modern settings, expertise was assessed on the basis of practical skills rather than academic credentials.52 The sources on which this study is based, however, often used the term “expert” (experto) and related terms (see the follow-ing paragraphs) to describe individuals with theoretical knowledge and individuals who had practical experiential knowledge. Despite the emphasis put on practical experience to define an expert, as several studies have shown, it must not be forgotten that apart from practical or technical knowledge, early modern expertise could be defined as control over a body of knowledge, that is, theoretical, erudite knowledge.53 It was not unusual for professors of astrology at universities to be required to publish annual


54. See Tayra M. C. Lanuza Navarro, Astrología, ciencia y sociedad en la España de los Austrias, PhD dissertation, Universitat de València, 2005, pp.110–53.

55. From the Latin qualificare, meaning to judge, define, describe.

prognostications, as was the case in Spanish universities.54 Thus, the theoretical knowl-edge of these expertos could also be coupled with practical astrological skills.

As the description of the sources that follow show, these “experts” were called exper-tos, peritos, or sabios (expert, skilled, wise) in the trials as well as other inquisitorial documents. Perito is a term with an empirical implication, thus charged with the mean-ing of someone with practical experience. The connotations of the term sabio, however, are of theoretical knowledge of the bookish kind resulting from regular early modern university training. Both kinds of experts – with practical experience and with theoretical knowledge – were consulted. The sources very often refer to the people called forth to act as experts with the specifically inquisitorial term calificadores. A calificador was the person appointed by the Inquisition to evaluate books and declarations and decide about their legitimacy.55

The Inquisition consulted astrological experts on several instances. First, in trials, the experts were to assess the activities of the person accused and to explain if those activi-ties were forbidden astrological practices. Second, they were to evaluate the books and documents belonging to those being prosecuted. These were usually collected and con-fiscated when people were arrested by inquisitorial officers. Third, experts were asked to send a report to the Inquisition about the contents of the confiscated printed works. Their reports would recommend whether the work should be withdrawn from circulation, included in the Index of Prohibited Books, or added to the list of works to be expurgated (permitted only after the passages referring to forbidden astrology had been eliminated). The same kinds of experts, now acting as calificadores, made reports specifying the parts of the book to be crossed out. And finally, the Inquisition asked the opinion of experts in the preparation of the rules included at the beginning of the catalogues of prohibited books. These rules, which appeared at the beginning of each edition of the Index, estab-lished what kind of astrology was forbidden. In all cases, the way these experts expressed their opinions about the subject tells us much about the debate regarding astrology in this inquisitorial context. Discussions were focused on two issues: the interpretation of the set of Church injunctions against astrology (mainly the papal Bull Coeli et Terrae and rule nine of the Spanish Index of Prohibited Books) and the expertise needed to decide about the prosecution of astrological practitioners.

The contents of both the Bull and the rule of the Spanish Inquisition are widely known to historians. Pope Sixtus V, in Coeli et Terrae, condemned all forms of divination. Such foreknowledge was reserved only for God. Those who claimed to have attained it were using demonic knowledge. When classified this way, astrology, along with other divina-tory practices, was considered “a vain and false art” (supradictas damnatas, vanas, fal-laces et perniciosas divinandi artes). The Bull, however, exempted natural astrological predictions: those “related to agriculture and meteorology, medicine and navigation.” It explicitly forbade judicial astrological predictions: those “about contingent future events, or actions that depend on man’s free will, even if they claim that they are not predicting anything as certain.” The ninth rule of the 1583 Spanish Index of Prohibited Books

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56. Catalogus librorum prohibitorum, mandato Illustrissimi et Reverendissimi, D. D. Gasparis Quiroga, Cardinalis Archiepiscopi Toletano, ac in regnis Hispaniarum Generalis Inquisitoris denuo editus (Madrid: Alphonsum Gomezium, 1583), 4r.

57. On the periodization of the Inquisition see Jean-Pierre Dedieu, “Les Quatre temps de l’Inquisition,” in Bartolomé Benassar (ed.) L’Inquisition Espagnole (XVe –XIXe siècle) (Paris: Hachette, 1979), pp.15–42. See also José Pérez Villanueva and B. Escandell Bonet (eds.) Historia de la Inquisición de España y América, vol. I. Historia de la Inquisición de España y América, vol. I (Madrid, Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1984). On the variety of tribunals and local differences, see William Monter, Frontiers of Heresy. The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

58. Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN) Secc. Inq. Libro 732, fol. 116. Muñoz Calvo, Inquisición, mentioned this trial, p.108.

against magic and divination initially coincided with the Bull in its general ban of astrol-ogy. It then went on to describe more specific prohibitions related to astrology, empha-sizing the idea of man’s free will and referring to nativities, interrogations, and elections as forbidden practices. However, the rule also included a clarification about what parts of astrology were to be allowed. This measure resulted in exceptions, which opened a wide and often fairly contradictory field for interpretation:

But we do not forbid either the parts of astrology related to the knowledge of the weather and general events of the world, or those that teach how to know from the nativity of a person his inclinations, conditions and corporeal qualities. We do not forbid either the predictions that belong to agriculture, navigation and medicine or the [astrological] elections related to these natural things.56

With this ruling, experts had an open field to debate which nativities and astrological elections entered into the category laid down by the rule.

Let us now consider some examples of prosecutions involving these rules. The trials under consideration come from different periods and different courts. They span the period from the beginning to the end of the seventeenth century. As historians of the Inquisition have pointed out, the institution changed dramatically between its founding in 1478 and its dissolution in the nineteenth century. The general context for each case, as also for each local tribunal, was different: different types of victims predominated at different times; different concerns predominated in different courts; and the monarchy’s political power fluctuated.57 But between the publication of the Index of 1583 and the end of the seventeenth century, the rules regarding astrology remained constant. The arguments that were employed in the trials regarding who should be considered an authority in astrology were similar to Pedro Sánchez Ciruelo’s arguments, as well as to those found in the reports on astrology sent to the Inquisition. These similarities allow for a better understanding of how experts behaved in the various trials and their role in the general debate about astrology itself.

The first case to be considered is the trial of Jerónimo Oller, prosecuted by the court of Barcelona in 1611. Oller was a clergyman, a priest of the cathedral of Barcelona.58 It is important to notice in this case the use of several terms to refer to expertos. The histori-cal actors employed the terms expertos de astrología (experts of astrology) as well as


59. “Estos papeles fueron examinados por expertos de astrología, que dixeron…”; “uno [de los testigos es] muy práctico en astrología.”

60. “Debía ser examinado por tres calificadores, que fueron del parecer que se debía recoger por el Santo Oficio.”

61. “Quatro testigos [declararon], uno muy práctico en astrología” (AHN Secc. Inq. Libro 732, fol. 116).

62. “Dixo que por arte de Astrología no se podía alcançar a saber lo que el dicho Oller había adivinado” (AHN Secc. Inq. Libro 732, fol. 116).

63. Albohazen Ali was one of the ways early modern authors referred to Abû l-Hasan 'Alî ibn Abî l-Rijâl, the astrologer of the tenth and eleventh century often cited also as Hali and as Abenragel, as mentioned in note 31. Erhard Ratdolt’s edition of Abenragel’s work translated into Latin was printed in Venice in 1485 and was commonly known as De iudiciis astro-rum. See D. Pingree, “Ibn Abi ‘l-Ridjal, Abu ‘l-Hasan ‘Ali,” in B. Lewis, V.L. Ménage, Ch. Pellat and J. Schacht, Assisted by C. Dumont, E. van Donzel and G.R. Hawting (eds.) Encyclopaedia of Islam, Vol. III (Leiden: Brill, 1986), p.688.

64. AHN Secc. Inq. Libro 732, fol. 116: “Los papeles y quadernos, vistos por expertos de astrología, dixeron que muchas de las cosas en ellos contenidas no se pueden alcanzar por la buena astrología, y que algunos de los libros son reprobados” (my italics).

65. They are referred to as “astrólogos muy prácticos,” “personas peritas en la arte de Astrología,” and “expertos de astrología” in the inquisitorial file (my italics).

muy práctico en astrología (well versed in astrology) during this trial.59 Oller was accused of “making and printing prognostications and casting natal figures, making pre-dictions based on interrogations, and he affirmed future and past secret things.” During his trial, the Inquisition decided that three calificadores should examine a prognostica-tion Oller had made for the year 1611. The experts recommended that copies of this text should be collected by the Inquisition to prevent its circulation.60 It is worth emphasizing that at Oller’s trial, one of the witnesses was consulted as an expert because he was con-sidered “well versed in astrology.”61 This witness said that “using astrology it was not possible to get to know the things that Oller had predicted.”62

Among the papers Oller had at home, the inquisitors found “many books on inter-rogations and figures of nativities, and also [the book by] Albohazen Ali De Judiciis, which is a book disapproved by theologians.”63 He confessed that a portfolio with many natal figures had indeed been written by him, and that he possessed another book with many rules for astrological judgments that he had bought in Valencia. Several other astrologers were asked by the Inquisition to examine these documents and books belonging to the defendant. The conclusion of these experts was that “many things con-tained in Oller’s documents could not be known using good astrology, and that some of his books were disapproved” (emphasis mine).64 Thus, the experts in their testimonies insisted on the difference between “good astrology” and the divination practiced by the defendant. The latter activity was not a part of the “good art of astrology” but rather belonged to other kinds of practices. One of the main issues that emerge from these testimonies is the awareness of the experts that, in a certain sense, it was not just the defendant who was on trial, but the discipline itself. So, they were very careful to con-demn the activities of Oller while simultaneously stressing that these were not accept-able to them as “well versed astrologers,”65 and thus astrology itself should not be

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66. Archivo Diocesano de Cuenca (ADC), Inq., leg. 553, exp. 6932. Mentioned in Adelina Sarrión Mora, Médicos e Inquisición en el siglo XVII (Cuenca: Universidad de Castilla la Mancha, 2006).

67. ADC, Inq., leg. 504 (1); mentioned in Sarrión Mora, Médicos.

condemned. They were also simultaneously establishing their own authority on the sub-ject by differentiating themselves from the accused astrologer, whom they wanted the Inquisition to perceive as a practitioner lacking the needed learning to practice “good” (that is, Catholic, licit) astrology.

In the two following cases, those of the physicians Isidro Gil and Francisco Martínez, who were prosecuted in Cuenca in the 1690s, the main theme emerging from the sources is disagreement. The experts disagreed about how to characterize the defendants’ astro-logical activities. Their reports show that personal opinions and interpretations of the rules and of the Bull Coeli et Terrae could lead to different trial outcomes.

The physician Isidro Gil was accused of practicing forbidden astrology in Cuenca in 1692.66 In this case, the experts consulted by the inquisitors disagreed about how Gil’s astrological practice should be classified: whether as natural astrology, and thus licit, or as judicial astrology, and thus forbidden. Three experts were asked to judge the activities of Gil as they were described by witnesses, as well as his own response to the accusa-tions. The first consultant, a Trinitarian friar, concluded that the defendant had not com-mitted any crime with his practice of astrology. The two Franciscan friars who were also consulted dissented. They were certain that Gil had engaged in superstitious divination and said that, according to Sixtus V’s Bull, he should be condemned by the Inquisition. Differing interpretations of the Bull could make a huge difference in the consultants’ opinions. Because of these dissimilar opinions, the inquisitors decided to consult two more experts – in this case, two Dominican friars. They agreed with the Franciscans and asserted that Gil’s activities should be classified as judicial astrology, not natural astrol-ogy, and therefore were forbidden and subject to prosecution.

There was also a similar disagreement among the experts consulted in the case of the physician Francisco Martínez, also in the court of Cuenca in 1693.67 Seven experts were asked their opinions about his practices. They all concurred that predicting the location of stolen items was a forbidden and superstitious practice, falling under the category of judicial astrology. However, when they had to judge the natal charts he had made, they disagreed. Four of them saw the practice as judicial and were sure that it was forbidden by the papal Bull. The other three concluded that, as they were figures constructed to “know about the outcome of an illness,” it was an allowed practice. Astrological medi-cine was one of the parts of the discipline considered natural astrology, allowed indeed by the ninth rule as well as by Sixtus V’s Bull. These cases again show that the difference between permitted and forbidden practices was not always clear. Some advisors of the Inquisition accepted natal charts when their objective was to predict the course of an ill-ness. Other advisors accepted them more widely, also considering natal charts as natural astrology when their interpretation generally depended on humoral constitution influ-enced by the heavens, such as the personal complexion and temperament or a general account of the physical and moral characteristics of the person.


68. “Es todo de materia judiciaria, y aunque haya doctrinas muy buenas para la medicina que se pudieran permitir según la regla y la Bula de Sixto, todavía andan trabadas con la materia judiciaria en modo que quedan inficcionadas y reprobadas” (AHN Secc. Inq. Leg. 88–14).

69. “Si bien en dichos papeles incluso se contienen algunas observaciones más físicas que super-sticiosas en orden a la agricultura, medicina y fisonomía, las quales no están prohibidas suel-tas por sí solas, pero estando juntas con dichas prohibidas proposiciones no se debe reparar en que juntamente queden prohibidas, no siendo de provecho alguno común ni fáciles de separar, principalmente siendo en lo científico de la physica y astrología, más que doctrinas acertadas, delirios y sueños ridículos.” Even if the use of the term “lo científico,” the scien-tific, was not usual, it must be noted that this is not a unique case in Renaissance works. It must not be anachronistically interpreted as ‘scientific’ in the modern sense. The inquisitor is using “lo científico” to refer to medicine and natural astrology in contrast with ‘the deliri-ums and ridiculous dreams’ of what he considers superstitious practices. The term must, of

The trial of the Italian Giacomo Bramoselli in 1660 also featured this critical debate about what was natural and what was judicial astrology. This trial involved the examination of practices related to magic and superstition as well as fraud. The trial lasted from 1660 to 1663, with several declarations of the defendant. At a certain point a member of the Inquisition wrote a summary of Bramoselli’s statements. His opinion was that everything Bramoselli said was “of judicial nature, and even if there are [in astrology] very good doc-trines for medicine that could be allowed according to the rule and the Bull by Sixtus, they are still mixed with judicial things in a way that they become infected and condemned.”68 The opinion of the prosecutor reflects the difficulty that historical non-specialist agents in astrology found in discerning natural astrology from judicial practices, and shows the con-sequent position of some inquisitors before the discipline. The boundaries between ‘useful’ medical astrology, and superstitious, condemned astrology were too diffuse; all aspects of astrology mixed and became indiscernible.

Several experts, including two Jesuits, a Trinitarian, and a Franciscan, were asked not only as theologians, but also as astrological experts to examine Bramoselli’s documents. The personal opinion of one of the Jesuit examiners, Baptista Dávila, was that the Inquisition should not worry about distinguishing between natural and judicial practices. Even if astrological medicine was acceptable, he considered that the effort needed to establish the distinction between natural medical astrology and judicial astrology in each case was not worth it. His advice to the Inquisition was to ignore the parts of astrology which could be useful for their medical interest, to not invest time and resources in trying to find out if it was natural or judiciary astrology that was contained in each written work under evaluation. His opinion was that every astrological activity should be condemned. Dávila’s words read:

Even if in the documents [belonging to Bramoselli] there are some physical observations that are not superstitious related to agriculture, medicine and physiognomy, not forbidden in themselves, [they are] placed alongside forbidden propositions, so we should not hesitate in forbidding them too, because they could not be beneficial and are not easy to separate from the other [propositions]; [as considering] the scientific [aspects] of physics and astrology they are deliriums and ridiculous dreams more than proper doctrines.69

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course, be understood in the context of an early modern structure of knowledge, where the word scientia was associated with the Aristotelian notion of certainty and with knowledge of causes. See Pamela H. Smith, “Science on the Move: Recent Trends in the History of Early Modern Science,” Renaissance Quarterly 62 (2009): 345–75. See also Peter Dear, “What is the History of Science the History of? Early Modern Roots of the Ideology of Modern Science,” Isis 96 (2005): 390–406.

70. AHN Inq. Lib. 1245, fols. 77–81. Report by Fernando de Vera, archbishop of Buxía, dated 11 April 1622: “El obispo de Buxía remitió este papel [a]cerca de los astrólogos por saber de esta ciencia y ser muy buen teólogo y calificador.” Regards the report, see also Pardo-Tomás, Ciencia y censura; Sarrión Mora, Médicos, pp.194–8.

71. “Algunos teólogos y juristas que, con buen celo, sin distinguir lo malo de lo bueno, condenan la judiciaria sólo porque con este nombre hay otras supersticiones, y condenan … lo que no han estudiado.”

72. “De todo lo dicho se ve claramente, según la doctrina de santo Tomás, luz de la escuela teológica, que la astrología judiciaria en lo tocante a nacimientos no es mala, juzgando la figura como el mismo santo enseña, y según esto, ni tampoco es prohibida por el motu propio de Sixto V.”

So Dávila’s idea was that the wrong part of astrology – that is, judicial prognostications – somehow corrupted what he called lo científico (the scientific aspects) of astrological medicine and natural astrology. His conclusion was that the easiest path for the Inquisition was to forbid it all.

The defenders of the discipline argued that this was precisely the reason why astrolo-gers alone, or perhaps together with theologians, should be consulted. Theologians, they argued, could not differentiate between natural astrological knowledge based on physical causes, and those based on divination; they simply condemned them all. It was the same problem Ciruelo had stated in the Apotelesmata Astrologiae Christianae going back to 1521.

Several reports by experts in astrology consulted by the Inquisition in later periods expressed the same concern. The Inquisition asked Fernando de Vera, the bishop of the city of Bujía, to write a report in 1622 because “he knows about this science and is a very good theologian and calificador.”70 Vera criticized the members of the Inquisition who had not studied astrology and still condemned it despite their lack of knowledge: “Without distinguishing right from wrong, some theologians and jurists condemn judi-cial astrology only because they think that the term implies superstition, and they con-demn what they have not studied.”71 Fernando de Vera based his report in a defense of the discipline based on Thomas Aquinas. Following Aquinas, he considered that natal charts should not be considered illicit: “If the natal chart is interpreted the way Thomas Aquinas taught, then judicial astrology concerning nativities is not bad, therefore, it is not forbidden by Sixtus Vth motu propio.”72 The bishop was then echoing this same idea about authority in astrology: theologians and jurists did not know enough about astrol-ogy to offer an expert opinion. They could not discern what practices or ideas about genethlialogy (natal astrology) were licit and not included in Sixtus’ prohibition, so they were not the right experts to be consulted.


73. See Robert S. Westman, “The Astronomer’s role in the Sixteenth Century. A Preliminary Study,” History of Science 18(2) (1980): 105–47; Mario Biagioli, “The Social status of Italian Mathematicians, 1450–1600,” History of Science 27 (1989): 41–95; Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier. The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp.211–44.

Conclusion

Debates about expertise and who possessed the requisite knowledge to be considered an authority on a discipline related to the study of nature constituted an interesting moment in early modern Europe. It was a period characterized by debates about the cognitive status of philosophy versus mathematics and by the calls of astronomers for their expla-nations to be perceived as true representations of the cosmos, and not dismissed as only computational devices.73

In the case of astrology, expertise in the discipline meant knowledge of the different branches of astrology and of whether or not they could be accepted. The witnesses con-sulted in the trials, the experts called in as calificadores, and the testimonies regarding the defendants’ activities given by those considered “well versed” in the discipline were valued by the inquisitors for the specific cases. But expertise in astrology also meant knowledge of a discipline under suspicion for a number of reasons. Therefore, the experts always tried to defend astrology as a legitimate discipline, hardly limiting themselves to only assessing the particular case they were being called upon to evaluate.

The participation of experts in the trials evolved into a discussion about who was qualified to judge books on astrology and astrological practices. The experts were con-cerned that if the verdict was left only to theologians who had no astrological knowledge, their ignorance of the differences between the branches of astrology could lead them to condemn it all. Thus, they discussed the ideal prerequisite training advisors and inquisi-tors should have, yet disagreed on what qualified someone as an expert.

The European debate about astrology during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had specific traits in Spain because of decisions related to astrology made by the Spanish Inquisition. It developed around the pronouncements of the Inquisition regarding works on astrology, but also around the testimonies of experts in the trials. The personal attitudes and opinions of the inquisitors and the experts they consulted played a major role in the debates on astrology. The different inquisitors and experts never arrived at a consensus regarding the discipline or the aspects of it that should be allowed or forbidden. The debate about expertise was ultimately a debate about authority. Defenders of the discipline tried to argue that authority in evaluating the practice of astrology meant specific knowledge of it. Theologians argued that authority was legitimated by the superiority of theological knowledge, espe-cially if the discussion concerned Christian doctrine and specific aspects of astrology that contradicted it. Thus, as in other instances, it was not just a question of who had the neces-sary knowledge to decide, but also a question of who had the power to make the decisions.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank John Slater, María Portuondo and Víctor Navarro Brotons and the referees for their comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to William Eamon, Maríaluz López Terrada

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and José Pardo Tomás for their continuous support. I would also like to express my gratitude to the late professor Germana Ernst, who helped me from the very beginning, whose work is always an intellectual model in this field, who was always kind and generous, and who will be missed.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Mellon Fellowship (2014–2015)) and The Huntington Library (Dibner Program in the History of Science Fellowship (2015–2016)).

Author biography

Tayra M.C. Lanuza-Navarro (PhD History of Science, University of Valencia) research focuses on the study of the role of astrology in the ideas, practices and activities of early modern astrono-mers, cosmographers and physicians, on the censorship of astrology and related disciplines by the Spanish Inquisition and on the representation of science and medicine in early modern literature.