No description available.

Cecco d'Ascoli (1269?-1327), was burned at the stake in Florence as a heretic on 16 September, 1327. The Inquisitor also set aflame his texts: a Latin textbook on astronomy and Acerba, a 4867 verse "scientific epic" written in his particular Italian vernacular. The Inquisitor also banned the possession of either text on pain of excommunication. Despite the ban, the texts survived and even flourished. However, Acerba never engaged the public to the extent that the tragedy suffered by the text's author has. For almost seven hundred years, this "anti-Comedy" has gone largely uninterrupted due to the difficulty of the language, an enigmatic hybrid of several vernaculars, and due to the difficulty of the content, technical medieval science written in verse by an author habituated to syncopating his arguments for a university audience familiar with the material. In this dissertation, I provide a reading of the two most difficult chapters, Acerba I.i and I.ii, where Cecco sets forth his system of "applied astrology" that serves as a General Unifying Theorem to explain all phenomena in the cosmos. In Acerba, Cecco presents a cosmos bound tightly together by principles of interactions that I term "applied astrology", his Grand Unifying Theorem that unites God, angels and humanity. Just as twentieth and now twenty-first century physics tries to find a "Theory of Everything" that can account for both quantum mechanics and general relativity, theories that seem mutually exclusive, Cecco's intellectual goal was to unite a theory of causative astral influences and independent human intellects. The crux of the problem is this: if we believe that astral influences alter earthly life, how can we claim that we, as humans, are independent agents? Cecco wants to account for astral influences, which he sees as a link between man and God, and save free will, and this forms the base of his ethical theories expounded throughout Acerba but especially in Acerba I.i and I.ii. These chapters are thus key to understanding the entire work. To arrive at an understanding Acerba requires a summation of Cecco's life, an understanding of the intellectual and cultural stakes in his work and a thorough knowledge of his scholastic commentaries in Latin. These, written specifically to make medieval astronomy comprehensible to fourteenth-century undergraduates, are a clear prose exposition of the same "system of everything" that he sets out in Acerba. Before I approach the poem, I will review the content of his Latin prose. Once the basic features of his applied-astrological system are understood, we will then be in a position to understand this notoriously difficult text and examine the merits of Cecco's solution to the problem of free will and material determinism.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

The focus of this thesis is Firmicus Maternus, his text the Mathesis, and their place in the intellectual culture of the fourth century AD. There are two sections to this thesis. The first part considers the two questions which have dominated the scholarship on the Mathesis and relate to the context of the work: the date of composition and Firmicus' faith at the time. Chapter 1 separates these questions and reconsiders them individually through an analysis of the three characters which appear throughout the text: Firmicus, the emperor, and the addressee Mavortius. The second part of the thesis considers the Mathesis within the intellectual culture of the fourth century. It examines how Firmicus establishes his authority as a didactic astrologer, with an emphasis on Firmicus' use of his sources. Chapter 2 examines which sources are credited. It considers the argument that Manilius is an uncredited source through an analysis of the astrological theory of the Mathesis and the Astronomica. In addition, the astrological theory of Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos is compared to the Mathesis to assess Firmicus' use of his named sources. The methods that Firmicus uses to assert his authority, including his use of sources, are compared to other didactic authors, both astrological or Late Antique in Chapter 3. This chapter examines whether Firmicus' suppression and falsifying of sources is found in other didactic literature. Chapter 4 considers possible reasons for the omission of Manilius' name and also the effect that this has had on intellectual culture and the place of the Mathesis within it.