The Starry Rubric: Seventeenth-Century English Astrology and Magic
In The Starry Rubric, Alexander Cummins shows how astrology and magic offered analysis, interpretation, and solutions — locating humanity in a shifting web of interrelation with the stars and, indeed, the cosmos as a whole in the seventeenth century. Through analysis and example, Cummins demonstrates the ways in which astrology and magic were crucial to early modern perspectives on human life, time, and meaning.
Seventeenth-century England was a turbulent place to live. It was a century of civil wars, regicide, food riots and plague — a time of millenarian prophets and threatening witches, of radical sects and experiments in Commonwealth. It was also a revolutionary period. The lifting of printing press censorships created a veritable explosion of printed materials: from popular almanacs and calendars to handbooks of do-it yourself medicine, from vulgate Bibles to tomes of new, investigative natural philosophy and grimoires of occult science and ritual magic. In the midst of all this, the astrologer-magicians of seventeenth-century England drew their charts of the heavens, divining answers and prescribing magical medicines.
The Starry Rubric: Seventeenth-Century English Astrology and Magic
Alexander Cummins.
ISBN 978-1-907881-21-3 (Hardback)
216mm x 140mm
165 Pages.
Published November 2012.
