RE: Stylistics of the "astrological" section
davidjackson > 14-11-2018, 05:50 PM
Alfonso X truly believed that astrology affected us all. IIRC, in his Partidas (an early Civil Code) he permitted people of good standing to carry out astrological based fortune divination, whilst at the same time banning under pain of death other types of divination for being works of the devil. And Astronomy & Astrology were one of his seven liberal arts, the arts that a wise man must master.
And of course Alfonso's work was, although cutting edge, only translating from the Arabic. But these works were widely available to those of his courts, and people travelled from all over Europe to study, either in the Moorish open universities of Cordoba and Toledo, or at the Alfonsine court. So the influence of his works were felt throughout Europe.
But I would suggest that astrological divination underwent a quite a development from the 1270's to the mid 1400's. Although much of the verbal bunkum we now associated with astrology actually developed during the Renaissance period, in the 15th century we are seeing early birth charts and attempts by people who really should know better to "uncover the secrets best left to God". Alfonso was simply translating the magic of the Arabs, but once the basics were there Europeans started creating their own pseudoscience around this.