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Goal.
Goal.
This two-year project aims to study prognostication in its various forms (geomancy, astrology, and prophecy) as effective methods adopted by medieval people to cope with uncertainties, anticipate upcoming events, control their material and psychological impact, avoid damages, and transform the world.
Key Objectives & Impact.
Key Objectives & Impact.
1 The project will explore a set of cases representative of the methods adopted by medieval people to predict and provide for the future: conjunction astrology, geomancy, prophecy, medicine, and their connection with political events and eschatological expectations. Prognostication and related planning strategies will be studied as relevant to the fulfilment of individual needs, the control of societal dynamics, the management of political and religious phenomena. These topics will be analyzed from a multicultural perspective within the different medieval linguistic and religious areas along five main axes (A-E below).
2 The project will address an important part of Europe’s material cultural legacy by preserving, making available, and studying medieval sources, works, and manuscripts related to prognostication through critical editions, manuscript catalogues, and glossaries as well as through digital resources.
3 By encouraging citizens’ participation in a collective analysis of contemporary forms of prognostication, the project will have a beneficial impact in terms of public usefulness and human wellbeing. The historical-philosophical reconstruction of the medieval predictive techniques will lay the foundations for a philosophical analysis of our society’s manifold strategies for appropriating the future and their psychological, political, and cultural implications. This objective will be achieved through collaborative thinking, involving specialists of other disciplinary areas and conducting a massive public awareness campaign.
Five Axes.
Five Axes.
Five units contribute to the objectives of this project; their action is further articulated along the five axes listed below (A-E). As the interplay between different units within the five axes demonstrates, the research group is intended to work in synergy and the scientific contributions of each unit are meant to be interconnected and complementary.
A - The social relevance of predictive techniques.
Predictive techniques had a significant impact on medieval societies, economy, and political affairs. Dynastic strategies were based on the study of the dynamics of parent-to-child transmission of genetic inheritance. The project will deal with the question of predictability of secondary and accidental traits, believed to follow variable and diversified patterns within the same genealogical group, and reconstruct the explicative models of genetic content in the medical, philosophical, and theological discussion between 1200-1400. Geomancy provides another example of influential predictive practice. The treatises on geomancy (both Arabic-to-Latin translations and works originally written in Latin or the vernacular), most of which are still unpublished, included standard topics with the geomancer’s judgments, designed to allow the practitioner to easily answer questions related to aspects of everyday life (e.g., what the weather would be like; whether a sick person could be cured; when and under what circumstances it was appropriate to undertake a specific action [a trip, a marriage, a battle, etc.]). These texts addressed the ruling class of the time. The project will point out the resemblances of the geomantic technique with the advanced tools that today are used in social sciences to perform data analysis in order to answer questions about upcoming events and to identify the best solutions, maximizing profits or minimizing risks.
B - The political impact of “great conjunctions”.
Conjunction astrology, first theorized by the Arab astrologer Albumasar toward the end of the ninth century, attempted to explain general events in the sublunary world (e.g., dynastic changes, wars, natural disasters) as the result of the mutual relationships of the celestial bodies. Albumasar’s De magnis coniunctionibus, translated into Latin by John of Seville in the 12th century, ensured this theory wide currency during the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Times. This controversial doctrine gave rise to theological discussions and eschatological expectations (e.g., the horoscope of religions). The pseudo-Ovidian poem De vetula even Christianized the Albumasarian scheme, using it as an astrological proof of the near triumph of Christianity. Roger Bacon incorporated conjunctionism into his political and religious project. Unsurprisingly, conjunction astrology has sparked the interest of contemporary scholars, who have defined it «astrological history». This project focuses on this branch of astrology in a bid to investigate three topics so far neglected or understudied: first, the work and influence of John Aschenden, an expert in planetary conjunctions and an author of astrological predictions; second, the use of conjunction astrology as a conceptual tool to explain and predict plague epidemics (e.g., the Black Death) and natural catastrophes; third, the religious use of conjunction astrology for apologetic purposes and its merging with eschatological and apocalyptic prophecies.
C - Strategies for political and social management: prophecy and science.
The Biblical prophets are said to predict the future, reveal the mysteries of the past, and interpret human history within an eschatological framework. They perform a public function by announcing God’s message and disclosing to mankind the path to salvation. During the Middle Ages, the Biblical notion of prophecy underwent a profound transformation due to several factors: the assimilation of Islamic and Jewish conceptions, the influences of apocalyptic trends in medieval society, and the use of prophetic predictions within political strategies. The project aims to consider prophecy both as foreknowledge and as a political message impacting on society and history. This inclusive approach, which is essential for gaining an insight on this phenomenon, tends to be neglected by the current scholarly literature, which usually focuses on specific aspects of prophecy, from distinct disciplinary perspectives (e.g., theory of knowledge, religious studies, history, politics, etc.) Models of political management were also drawn from science. Rational strategies were aimed at improving the quality of life and social interactions, on the ground of biological and psychological knowledge of the human species. Rational techniques to understand and govern the interactions between bodily and emotional dynamics (‘passiones’) were used to negotiate uncertainty and instability. In this regard, the project will focus on concrete examples of biological, physiognomic, and medical doctrines in authors of the Faculties of Arts.
D - Prophethood and Political Leadership in the Islamic tradition.
In accord with its multicultural character, the project will also investigate prophethood in the Arabo-Islamic world. Here, two points deserve to be underlined. First, from the Arabo-Islamic perspective, politics holds the highest position among the practical disciplines, being the crowning of both ethics and economy. Thus, economic logics do not dominate the political agenda, as today generally happens; rather, political leaders are responsible for economic decisions, leading human beings to pursuing the common good. Economics only refers to the household, while politics encompasses the entire civil community. Second, politics is not only considered the summit of practical sciences, but also the apex of the philosophical encyclopaedia: thus, a political leader must undergo philosophical training. This view is documented in the works of the falsafa. Based on the two aforementioned assumptions, the Arabo-Islamic philosophy puts forward a model of political leadership rooted in the ruler’s ability to grasp the whole reality, both in space and in time. The project will investigate this articulated cluster of ideas, focusing on the link between the prophet’s political mission and his metaphysical perfection: in this view, the perfect leader is the “prophet” allowed to speak in God’s name insofar as he has a scientific cognition of all that God created and of God’s nature. This “prophetic conception of politics” prevailed in the Arabo-Islamic context and had nothing to do with a theocratic notion of “political power”. A political leader did not content himself with handling the present, but he was also concerned with the future and was able to foresee and predict it. Concretely, this line of research will address the analysis of the four sections of Avicenna’s major philosophical summa, the Book of Healing, in order to study the role of prophetic knowledge in political action (section of Metaphysics and Practical Philosophy) against the background of its epistemological foundation (sections of Logic, Natural Philosophy, and Astronomy).
E - Prophecy in the Jewish Tradition from the Middle Ages to the Present.
The section of Jewish studies takes a diachronical approach to prophecy. The project will focus on the responsa Moses Maimonides sent to various Jewish communities in the Middle East, North Africa, and France (The epistle on Martyrdom, The epistle to Yemen, The letter on Astrology). In these letters, he conveyed his vision of the Jewish future, society, and history to a non-philosophical audience. Thus, he adopted different approaches to govern the psychological, cognitive, and political uncertainty of single individuals and Jewish communities, depending on the type of addressee and the historical context. The project will also study the developments of the concept of prophecy as understood by the philosophical-rabbinical tradition, from Barukh Spinoza to Elia Benamozegh and Avraham Joshua Heschel, who have all posed the ethical messages of the prophets ad the center of their historiosophy. Without the ethical perspective, prophecy is exposed to the risks of ending in magic, an alternative way to try to control or predict the future.
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