Content area
Full Text
Anthony Grafton, Cardano's Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999; paperback, 2001. Pp. xii + 284, bibl, index. ISBN 0-674-00670-4 (paper). $16.95.
Renaissance astrology, we now know through the efforts of Anthony Grafton as well as Pierre Brind'Amour, W.-D. Müller-Jahncke, Patrick Curry, Angelika Geiger, Ann Geneva, and Germana Ernst, was not merely a popular passion reviled by the more astute philosophers (most famously, Pico della Mirandola), nor an esoteric science misunderstood by the masses. It was to some degree both. And by joining high-level intellectual theorizing with practical consultation, oral traditions with commercial endeavors, it was ambiguously situated between the two categories of high and low culture that historians of philosophy have most often held apart. To be sure, Girolamo Cardano was more than just an astrologer, as anyone already knows who has read Nancy Siraisi's valuable analysis of the medical oeuvre. Nor did his fame rest exclusively on his mathematical studies of probability, nor even on his celebrated autobiography. In the book under review, now in paperpack, Grafton's own urbane and eloquent authorial persona traces for us the themes that connected the intellectual accomplishments in a myriad of fields with the personal stories of success and failure, reconstructing a many-sided personality that, in Cardano's time, impressed as well as infuriated nearly everyone within reach.
Cardano himself was as much concerned to get on with the work of learning as he was to...