Jean-Patrice Boudet. Entre science et nigromance: Astrologie, divination et magie dans l'Occidentmédiéval (XIIe–XVe siècle) .Entre science et nigromance: Astrologie, divination et magie dans l'Occident médiéval(XIIe–XVe siècle) by Jean‐Patrice BoudetReview by: By Frank KlaassenIsis, Vol. 100, No. 1 (March 2009), pp. 151-152Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/599653 .

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exact sciences was to give expression to theprogressive development that the mathemati-cians, who aimed at proven knowledge, wereassuming but did not express in their own writ-ings.

Zhmud makes this claim in the face of recentrevisionist views according to which Aristotleand his successors reported the views of earlierthinkers only to deploy them dialectically inestablishing the superiority of the Peripateticposition. Zhmud offers a new and more persua-sive argument for regarding Eudemus’s ac-counts as legitimately historical. He bases it noton their admittedly ambiguous titles but on theircontent, which fits the progressivist point ofview better than the dialectical and conforms tothe goals of the Peripatetic historiographicalproject as he interprets it. His argument is con-vincing, though he overstates the dichotomy be-tween the historical and dialectical functionsand does not entertain the possibility that thePeripatetics may have had more than one pur-pose in collecting and presenting views of pre-decessors.

The last third of the book is devoted to areconstruction of the contents of the histories asprogressive accounts of the separate branches ofmathematics, along with a full analysis of Eu-demus’s influence on subsequent histories ofmathematical sciences. Zhmud’s reconstructionis the most comprehensive to date and will un-doubtedly become the basis for all future workon the subject.

DAVID E. HAHM

f Middle Ages and Renaissance

Jean-Patrice Boudet. Entre science et nigro-mance: Astrologie, divination et magie dansl’Occident medieval (XIIe–XVe siecle). 624 pp.,figs., tables, bibl., index. Paris: Publications dela Sorbonne, 2006. €45 (cloth).

Many decades have passed since the publicationof the final volume of Lynn Thorndike’s Historyof Magic and Experimental Science. In the in-tervening years, and particularly in the last de-cade, numerous studies, such as Richard Kieck-hefer’s Forbidden Rites and Nicolas Weill-Parot’s study of astrological image magic, haveprovided focused analyses of specific texts orintellectual traditions of magic. Yet, to thispoint, no one has attempted so broad an over-view of astrology, magic, and divination in thetwelfth through fifteenth centuries as Jean-Patrice Boudet has done in this volume. It isgratifying to find Entre science et nigromance

masterful, intellectually challenging, well ar-gued, and rich in detail.

The traditions of astrology, magic, and divi-nation in the later Middle Ages defy easy anal-ysis, and Boudet does not oversimplify the prob-lem. While they all share certain commonassumptions, their ends are for the most partvery different, they frequently travel separatelyin manuscript, and they were tolerated in vary-ing degrees. Many of the original traditions de-rived from other cultures, particularly Arabic,and passed through a complicated process ofcultural appropriation that often broke aparttheir original intellectual coherence. Complextemporal developments in institutional accep-tance and condemnation not only influencedhow the texts and practices were understood,which ones were actively promoted and whichcondemned, and how their practitioners weretreated but also had a qualitative impact on thetraditions themselves. Magic and divinationtranscended class boundaries; while each classhad distinctive traditions of its own, they alsoadopted traditions from each other, framingthem in their own terms. At the same time,Boudet rightly argues that there was a certaincoherence to all of these traditions, owing in partto complex intellectual filiation and in part tointellectual assumptions (particularly condem-natory ones) that—rightly or wrongly—re-garded them as a coherent whole and boundtheir fortunes together.

The first part of the book treats what Boudetregards as the first two distinct phases of the his-tory of astrology, magic, and divination: thetwelfth-century encounter with, and translation of,Arabic learning and the thirteenth-century questfor a theological norm in response to it. The firstthree chapters deal, respectively, with the texts andtraditions of astrology, divination, and magic. Thefourth describes the promotion of astrology byuniversities and princely courts (including the pa-pal see) in the thirteenth century and discusseshow this served to preserve and indirectly promoteother, more dubious, ideas and practices. The fifthchapter discusses the search for a theological andjuridical norm in response to these traditions, ar-guing that astrological principles became an ac-cepted part of the conventional view and thatmagic and divination could survive more easily ifthey could be passed off as an extension of thisscience. The second part of the volume deals withwhat Boudet regards as the third phase, in whichthis norm was applied, working to the benefit ofastrology and to the increasing detriment oflearned magicians and lower-level practitioners.Chapter 6 deals specifically with the promotion ofastrology in the universities and princely courts.

BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 100 : 1 (2009) 151

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Chapter 7 plots the proliferation of learned magicin the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, its trans-formations and selective transmission based onconventional assumptions, and the diffusion oflearned magic traditions into a broader portion ofthe population. Chapter 8 deals with the growingchorus of condemnation against magic and divi-nation, noting how it shifted its focus from malepractitioners of learned magic in the fourteenthcentury to female witches in the fifteenth.

Boudet successfully demonstrates that astrol-ogy, divination, and magic cannot be artificiallyseparated from each other and that an awarenessof the broader discourse is essential to an un-derstanding of the individual elements. Hisoverall time line of discovery, development,transformation, and condemnation is useful andwell argued. He does not explicitly locate hisdiscussion in the larger framework of the historyof science; nor does he claim to be writing sucha book. At the same time, Boudet’s work offersa useful basic framework for understanding tra-ditions that were to varying degrees regarded aselements of medieval natural philosophy, theinfluence that theology and Scholastic naturalphilosophy had on the intellectual and socialhistory of the West, and the ambivalence withwhich medieval people approached magic anddivination. His discussion of the promotion ofastrology (and, by association, of magic anddivination) by the universities and courts makesa particularly original and useful contribution tothe field. In addition to all of these considerablevirtues, a combination of breadth with diverseand rich references to manuscript sources willmake this work an indispensable standard of thefield for decades.

FRANK KLAASSEN

Isabelle Draelants. Le Liber de virtutibus her-barum, lapidum et animalium (Liber aggregatio-nis): Un texte a succes attribue a Albert leGrand. (Micrologus’ Library, 22.) 492 pp.,figs., bibl., indexes. Florence: Sismel Edizionidel Galluzzo, 2007. €64 (paper).

The text known as Liber de virtutibus herbarum,lapidum et animalium (also known in somemanuscripts as Experimenta Alberti) is a collec-tion of three tractates describing magical powersascribed to, respectively, sixteen plants, forty-six precious or semiprecious stones, and eigh-teen animals, many of them birds. It is one ofseveral short works that were in the late MiddleAges and thereafter frequently attributed to Al-bertus Magnus. The present volume contains anew study of the sources, context, and possible

authorship of the work, an analysis of its dis-semination in manuscripts and printed edi-tions, and a critical edition of the text accom-panied by an annotated French translation.Isabelle Draelants situates the Liber de virtu-tibus, the two oldest manuscripts of whichdate from circa 1290, among other thirteenth-century works displaying interest in the oper-ations of nature. She suggests that the treatiseoriginated in a Dominican environment closeto Albertus Magnus (p. 48), while also point-ing out that the attribution to Albert himselfappears to be contemporaneous with the com-pilation (p. 56). But although the Liber devirtutibus has a somewhat empirical cast andincludes occasional claims of experience, onlyone of its three sections—that on minerals—shows some parallels with an authentic workof Albertus. Instead, the author or compilerdrew on a variety of compendia and traditionsregarding natural magic, the properties ofplants, stones, and animals, and their uses inamulets and talismans.

Draelants’s careful investigation of the manu-script and printed tradition reveals the breadth ofthe dissemination and, one must suppose, read-ership that the Liber de virtutibus enjoyed wellinto the early modern period. She has identifiedseventy-six Latin manuscripts and no fewer than330 editions in Latin, German, Dutch, Italian,French, and English published between the firstcentury of printing and 1800. The lists, classifi-cation, and analysis of manuscripts and editionsprovided here will undoubtedly serve as an in-valuable reference resource for future scholarsworking on this and related texts. Analytic ta-bles of the sequence of entries in differentgroups of manuscripts show that the Liber devirtutibus underwent considerable modificationand rearrangement. As with some other medi-eval compilations of distinct short items (nota-bly collections of remedies), a practical or op-erative orientation ensured wide disseminationover several centuries but could also lead toconsiderable variation in the text. Moreover,since in both manuscript and early printed edi-tions the work edited in the present volumeusually formed part of a collection entitled Liberaggregationis that also included other shortworks of similar character and/or also attributedto Albertus, the list of editions is helpfully clas-sified into groups according both to languageand to the works brought together.

The edition, translation, and surroundingcommentary and bibliography will be of interestto medievalist historians of science and intellec-tual historians.

NANCY G. SIRAISI

152 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 100 : 1 (2009)

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