As above, so below. Astrology and the Inquisition in seventeenth-century New Spain

Abstract

History of astrology is no longer neglected. Studies on the subject now benefit from a rich historiographical tradition within various fields, such as history of science, history of art, intellectual history, and so on. In this opening section, I would like to present a general overview of the main themes and arguments that serve as a framework for a study on the history of astrology and the Inquisition in seventeenth-century New Spain. Other methodological and historiographical issues will be discussed in their corresponding sections. First, I will show how astrology became a salient object of historical inquiry as the result of crucial changes in the historiography of the Scientific Revolution from the 1960s onwards. This new historiography reflected both on the flexibility of previously fixed categories such as reason and faith or rationality and superstition, as well as on the boundaries between different fields of knowledge. Astrology was thus not considered anymore as a superstitious belief, but as a field whose transformations during the seventeenth century played a fundamental role in the shaping of modern disciplinary boundaries. Secondly, I will show how this change of narrative about the Scientific Revolution shifted the attention from the texts to the various contexts in which this entity called modern science was developed. As opposed to an internalistic analysis, this externalistic approach focuses on the study of different sites of knowledge, such as laboratories, universities, museums, or, in this case, the inquisitorial courtroom. Moreover, what this emphasis on context shows is that knowledge is not transmitted from one place to another in a unidirectional way. Rather, knowledge is adapted and creatively transformed in every different context.