Reading the Heavens in the Medieval South: The Integration of Astronomical and Astrological Knowledge into Early Castilian and Occitan Literature

The astrological turn of the long twelfth century: the Latin translations of astronomical and astrological treatises, among them Ptolemy translated by Gerard of Cremona and the Great Introduction to Astrology of Abu Ma'shar (Albumasar), met with a success whose scale is still not fully measured. Astronomy henceforth stood as a mathematical science, and astrology as the application of that science to the study of terrestrial phenomena. This entailed a profound change in the regime of knowledge, one that transformed the relation between human beings and the reality surrounding them: natural phenomena were no longer explained solely by divine intervention or by moral causes, but were read within a system, a natural order governed by the movements of the heavenly bodies. From the twelfth century onwards this interest in science in general, and in astrology in particular, irrigated the textual traditions of the Christian West, sometimes obliquely, as shown by the appearance of cosmological and planetary diagrams in the margins of manuscripts whose content bears no direct relation to the discipline (Coulson / Roy 2000). Spain was the principal theatre of this translation movement: the city of Toledo was the main centre of a major cultural translatio (Burnett 1994), a milieu whose intellectual networks and writing practices have been studied by the thesis director (Arizaleta 2010, 2014a, 2024, 2027 in press). It was therefore natural that the Iberian literatures, in Latin and in the vernacular, should be the first traditions to reflect the irradiation of astrological culture, in the scientific domain as well as in narrative literature (Burnett 2006). Far from remaining the preserve of specialists, astrology, magic and cosmology exercised a deep and lasting impact on society as a whole, as their presence in narrative texts addressed to broad audiences attests. The project studies the repercussions of this astrological turn in the earliest Castilian and Occitan literatures: the moment when the science of the heavens, freshly arrived in Europe, was received, transformed and set into narrative by vernacular writing. BEST places at the forefront new ways of producing, analysing and translating scientific knowledge; this is precisely what early Castilian and Occitan vernacular writing does, at its own historical scale, when it receives the knowledge of the sky. École doctorale : ALLPHA - Arts, Lettres, Langues, Philosophie, Communication Direction : Amaia ARIZALETA Financement : MSCA COFUND BEST