Stars

 

Our copy of the Astrolabum, viz., Lister’s copy of the Astrolabum, is littered with marginalia in what appears to be his own hand which shows that he was a diligent student, a scholar of his craft. Based on a comparison between his signature and the handwriting as it appears below several, detailed and colored woodcuts, Lister may have not only described what was occurring within each illustration, but may also have attempted to provide an explication as to what each individual image meant, as well. For instance, in one panel entitled “Homo debilis erit”, a man in a brown tunic appears to be lying in the green grass upon his back, dead; this drawing is surrounded by signs of the Zodiac, each of which has a number assigned to it. Below the panel is written: “A man as dead | He will be weak”. From the marginalia, it would appear as though that someone, perhaps Lister himself, had interpreted the woodcut, and then translated the text from Latin into English.

It is all rather chilling to think that this book, our Astrolabum, was owned by Thomas Lister, Astrologer: the man who may have successfully predicted not just the end of the American Civil War, but the death of one of our most-esteemed presidents, as well – by using astrology. 

A Brief and Most Easy Introduction to the Astrological Judgement of the Stars by Claude Dariot, translated by Fabian Wither, is a book on astrology, using the alignment and, at times, the physics of the stars to correlate those positions and movements to the everyday activities and expectations of 1500s society. This is a particularly interesting item due to its intense marginalia. Though it is not present on every page, there are detailed notes on some pages’ margins or on empty pages, including an elaborate, personal astrological chart for the reader. Not only that, but the book itself is interesting because the book contains two texts: Dariot’s and that of G.C., a gentleman of London who augments and elaborates on Dariot’s work in addition to producing his own section at the end on the Mathematics of astrology, with no recognition or credit to Dariot’s work which precedes it. There are also many essays on Dariot’s part that use the stars to justify certain expectations of early modern society. This exhibits a theme of Authorship and Readership, as who is really the author—Dariot in Latin, Wither as the translator, or G.C. in his augmentation (or all three)? Then again, is the reader writing the marginalia only a reader, or has he himself become an author or even an augmenter, despite it being used for (presumably) personal use? The lines of authorship and readership are tricky when looking at marginalia, translation, and publishing another work with Dariot’s.