'Astrology in the Renaissance' reader resistance

Many thanks to Ania for inviting me to be a guest author in this new blog. Look upon the latest addition to my abandoned book pile and weep, oh reader!

Astrology in The Renaissance

The Zodiac of Life

Eugenio Garin

I returned home from my two-week holiday in Italy raring to learn about astrology and its place in Italian Renaissance society.

Back in the early 1500s, there was not yet a complete split between Astrology and Astronomy and I had been mesmerised by the astrological meridian in the Basilica of San Petronio in beautiful Bologna.  That there was something of such extraordinary esoteric beauty in the middle of a Basilica piqued my interest and I wanted to learn MORE.

Back home, I quickly ordered up Astrology in the Renaissance from the Gods of Amazon and when it arrived, a scant 3 days later, I settled down in a corner of the sofa with my reading glasses and a mug of coffee.

But, things did not begin terribly well...

When a book's opening sentence is a ghastly 58 words long, I knew that I was in for a bumpy, boring ride.

Am I being unfair? You decide:

“It is almost a commonplace of recent historiography that one could, in the Renaissance, make a precise distinction in astrology between two aspects which had previously, in antiquity and he Middle Ages, been inextricably linked and were indeed frequently confused under the one category 'astrology': the first being the religious and superstitious aspect and the second analytical and scientific.”

** shakes the reader awake **

Maybe I was just not in the right frame of mind, but the convoluted sentences failed to engage me. I realised that I was reading and re-reading the same paragraphs over and over again, trying to make sense of them.

And on and on it went in similar vein. Quotes were provided first in their original Latin, and then followed in English. Some of the quotes were quite long, so as my eyes increasingly danced across the verbose pages, there were instances when I thought I had lost the power to understand English at all.

I abandoned Chapter 1 and headed straight into the Chapter on Neoplatonism and hermeticism, but I was still baffled and – the worst sin of all in a book – bored.

Number of pages read before abandoning: nine pages of introduction and a paltry six pages of Chapter 1.

To be fair, there isn't a universe where something like 'neoplatonism and hermeticism in astrology' is going to be easy to understand, but I think that I might have had more fun trying to read the book in its original Italian.

And right there is, I feel, the reason that the book fails.

The translation is, I'm sure, absolutely perfect grammatically – but it has resulted in a work that is as difficult to digest as a bowl of unripe bananas. Not only is it a translation, but it seems to have been translated by a team of people – Carolyn Jackson, June Allen and Clare Robertson.

Anything done by committee consensus is usually troublesome :)

Still, I'm not selling it. You never know – maybe one day I'll be smart enough to read it and understand it :)