Hopes, Fears, and Early Modern Astrology

Appearing in 1482, the Libro de la ventura – or Book of Fortune – became a staple of Renaissance parties. A bestseller across Europe, this parlour game was translated into numerous languages, was lavishly illustrated, and survives in many editions. The point of the game was to divine answers to tricky questions, a series of which players could choose from. Will my upcoming trip go smoothly? Will I recover from this illness? Does my spouse truly love me? Once a question was selected, the player rolled three dice then navigated their way through the book, following prompts until they landed on an answer.

The Libro de la ventura’s appeal partly lay in its dry humour. Many of the answers about love were clearly intended to make people laugh, not least: ‘Your husband is cheating on you – go and cheat on him too!’ This silliness made it less daunting to play with difficult, anxiety-inducing dilemmas about life, death, and relationships. But the playful could easily slide into the serious. In some surviving copies, owners crossed out dice combinations that led to bad answers, so they knew to roll again if their dice ever landed in that inauspicious combination. A similar game, Le sorti (1540), likewise marketed itself as a bit of fun, yet its stock questions were poignant and evergreen: will I have children and will they be healthy? Am I secretly disliked by others? Will the news I’m waiting for be good or bad? No matter how cynical the player, landing on a bad – or uncannily accurate – answer to such questions can be deeply unsettling.

Indeed, the real appeal of these fortune-telling games lay in the fact that the topics in play struck directly at core anxieties. The questions in the Libro de la ventura and Le sorti were standardised, phrased to be broadly applicable. Yet we know these were real questions that real people grappled with, partly because they are timeless and partly because of the evidence provided by the archives of practising diviners. The largest such archive is the case records of the London astrologers Simon Forman (1552-1611) and Richard Napier (1559-1634), which document around 80,000 horoscopic consultations, shedding light on the questions that bothered people around 1600. This was a period in which astrology had long been condemned by the Church and was beginning to be marginalised in elite culture. Physicians looked down on self-taught practitioners like Forman and Napier, dismissing them as quacks. Yet none of this stopped clients from coming in droves to their clinics, asking the astrologers to make known the unknown.

Early modern astrologers were the most general of general practitioners, in that people sought their help with all kinds of fears and anxieties. Forman and Napier’s records are thus a vivid index of what bothered early modern people. As with the parlour games, many questions were about love. People wanted to know whether they were courting the ‘right’ person. In 1600 Elizabeth Nichols – Napier’s servant – asked him whether her suitor John Chivoll, whom she did not actually love, was ‘a fit match for her’; her family was putting pressure on her and the dilemma was making her ‘mutch disquieted in mind’. The astrologers did not always record their answers, but in this case Napier noted that the outcome was ultimately in Elizabeth’s favour: ‘Nowe the match is broken off because she is unwilling to have him.’ In 1608 Edward Osborn asked whether he would obtain the love of the woman he sought; that he was still asking the same question two years later probably points to the answer. But he was far from the most anxious romantic. Barrington Mullens consulted Forman about his love life no fewer than a dozen times in a single year, at first asking for his prospects with Mary Hambden, before setting his sights instead on Elizabeth Southwell – only to later double check whether giving up on this new match would finally secure him Mary’s hand.

Platonic relationships also brought anxieties. Some asked the astrologers whether they would remain on good terms with friends, or whether bitter disputes would ever be resolved. People fretted over whether to reach out. Many asked if a certain person could be trusted. A few seemed on the edge of paranoia: in 1618 William Bouth asked whether he had ‘an evill enemy intending mischiefe’. Family dynamics also troubled many. Mothers worried about their children, and children about their parents. Would an absent family member – who was travelling, or at war – be ok?

Career anxieties were also predictably rife. Margaret Worsape asked whether she should keep working her trade in London or move to the country. William Tillye asked if it was better to stay in his current trade or to change (as his mother was urging him). Employees were curious about the possibility of promotion, while employers were anxious about new hires. Forman and Napier’s clients were also troubled by the bigger picture: by politics, plagues, and invasions. They were stressed about their health, when they would die and how, and what happened after death. Their mental health, and that of their friends and family, was also a keen cause of stress.

Divination archives teach us about the fears and anxieties of people in the past. Anxiety and fear are historically contingent, as are ideas of what is and what is not risky. Some of Forman and Napier’s clients asked questions that would not concern (most) of us today (is my neighbour a witch?). Others asked questions that are ageless: are there better days coming? Across the 17th century astrology was increasingly marginalised in European society, excised from university curricula, and its practice relegated to the sidelines of mainstream culture. Other specialists – therapists, career and financial advisers, and even insurance agents – gradually took over many of the roles of astrological consulting. Yet astrology has never left us, partly because the questions astrologers helped to answer also remain.
 

Michelle Aroney is a historian at Magdalen College, Oxford and a curator of Oracles, Omens and Answers at the Bodleian Library.