The Starry Rubric: Seventeenth-Century English Astrology and Magic

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.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. 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.