Astronomy Among the Arts

Astronomy Among the Arts examines the unique cultural prominence that medieval writers attribute to astronomy, who praise it as both the best of the arts and the most secure form of knowledge. The book contains two interrelated series of essays. One set studies the interdependence between astronomy and other liberal arts, charting the dynamic engagement between star study and grammar, rhetoric, geometry, music, and philosophy. Here, Sarah Kay centers on authors who were widely known from the Carolingian period to the Renaissance: Aratus and his Roman translators, Macrobius, Martianus Capella, and Boethius, and the Latin diffusion of the Persian astrologer Abū Mašar. The second set of essays presents new readings of medieval literary works, mainly in French, in the light of their awareness of astronomy's connections with these other arts. In these essays, the authors discussed include Philippe de Thaon, Chrétien de Troyes, and Christine de Pizan. Taken as a whole, Astronomy Among the Arts reveals that medieval astronomy was not just a narrow technical discipline. It also lay at the heart of people's efforts to make sense of the mysteries of the skies above their heads, efforts pursued in different ways by writers, painters, thinkers, and natural philosophers throughout the premodern period. Their interactions with star study, even with forms of it that had been technically superseded, produced important shifts in their broader cultural understanding of knowledge, nature, freedom, and the place of the divine.