ASTROLOGY, PLAGUE, AND

PROGNOSTICATION IN EARLY
MODERN ENGLAND: A FORGOTTEN
CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF PUBLIC

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HEALTH*

The otherwise unremarkable London astrologer Richard Edlyn

(1631–77) became a household name amongst prognostica-
tors when he correctly predicted the Great Plague of 1665 on
account of astronomical phenomena.1 Edlyn had been studying
the new Astronomia Carolina tables in his study on Bishopsgate
Street when he became deeply troubled by an upcoming astro-
nomical event of some significance. The event in question was
a great conjunction of two superior planets, Saturn and Jupiter,
set to take place in the morning of 10 October 1663. Knowing
from his training that planetary conjunctions heralded momen-
tous events on earth, Edlyn set out to discover the consequences
of this particular episode. His first step was to use his astronom-
ical tables to draw up a horoscope (see Plate 1). His next step

* Early versions of this article were presented at the Institute for Advanced
Studies in the Humanities at The University of Queensland, Australia, and the
History of Science, Medicine, and Technology seminar series at the University of
Oxford. I am grateful to the participants at both institutions for their feedback. I
would also like to thank Marcello Cattaneo, Erica Charters, Paige Donaghy, Rob
Iliffe, Jan Machielsen, Henry-James Meiring, Darrel Rutkin and, especially, Alex
Walsham, for their comments and suggestions.
1
Richard Edlyn, Prae-Nuncius Sydereus: An Astrological Treatise (London, 1664). Cf.
Marjorie Nicolson, who claimed no astrologers at the time were able to predict the Great
Plague: ‘English Almanacs and the “New Astronomy”  ’, Annals of Science, iv (1939), 7.
For Edlyn’s reputation into the eighteenth century, see, for example, Tycho Wing, Olympia
domata (London, 1744), sig. c4v. For the 1665 plague, see Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague
in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1985); A. Lloyd Moote and Dorothy C. Moote, The
Great Plague:The Story of London’s Most DeadlyYear (Baltimore, 2004).

Past & Present, no. 263 (May 2024)   © The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford
University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society, Oxford.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits
unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original
work is properly cited.
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac044 Advance Access published on 17 February 2023
82 PAST AND PRESENT

was to interpret it. Edlyn first noted that Saturn (♄) and Jupiter
(♃) were to meet in Sagittarius, a sign of the Fiery Triplicity,
the most significant of the four groups of Zodiac signs. He
recalled, moreover, that Saturn was responsible for various
medical calamities, afflicting bodies with fevers and fostering
disease-producing conditions such as ‘unwholsom Airs’ and
‘long and tedious Frosts’.2 Benign Jupiter generally stimulated

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more positive effects, but Edlyn concluded that in this particular
conjunction Saturn possessed more power and thus would exert
more influence. The astrologer also noticed that Mercury (☿)
was unfortunately in the treacherous sign Scorpio and, more
troublingly still, the third superior planet, Mars (♂), was in the
rising sign, Leo — yet another fiery sign.3
These were worrying findings. Taking into consideration the
influence of other cooperating causes, including an imminent
conjunction of Saturn and Mars in 1664, Edlyn concluded that
something terrible was afoot. Because the astronomical tables
he relied on were calculated for the meridian of London, Edlyn
knew it was London that was under threat and Londoners who
needed forewarning. Anticipating how useful his foresight would
be to his local community, who might be able to take action to
mitigate the impending threat, Edlyn set to work on a prognos-
tication, which he entitled Prae-Nuncius Sydereus (1664), a play
on Galileo’s celebrated Sidereus Nuncius (1610). As he carefully
explained therein, the Saturn–Jupiter conjunction meant that
Londoners, regrettably, had ‘great cause to fear an approaching
Plague, and that a very great one, ere the year 1665 be expired’.4
Soon after Edlyn published this unsettling forecast, the appear-
ance of two comets over London in December 1664 came to
be seen as further indication of impending pestilence, leading

2
Edlyn, Prae-Nuncius Sydereus, 60–1.
3
Ibid., 21. The date and time listed in Edlyn’s horoscope represent not the
beginning of the conjunction, which Edlyn thought was impossible to obtain
exactly, but the new moon that followed it. He explained this unusual procedure in
Observationes Astrologiae (London, 1658).
4
Edlyn, Prae-Nuncius Sydereus, 42. Remarkably, Edlyn’s analysis also led him to
predict that in London ‘great Destruction by Fire … will continue till the latter end
of the year 1666’. Ibid., 72.
 PLAGUE AND PROGNOSTICATION 83

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1. Edlyn’s horoscope (see n. 3 above). The conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter is
represented in the fifth house of the horoscope in the bottom right corner. The
planets meet in Sagittarius ♐. To the left of this is the fourth house, in which
Mercury can be seen in Scorpio ♏. Mars in Leo ♌ is at the cusp of the first
house, centre left on the horoscope. Source: The Bodleian Libraries, University of
Oxford, Bodl. Ashm. 543: Richard Edlyn, Prae-Nuncius Sydereus: An Astrological
Treatise (London, 1644), 21.

other astrologers to endorse his dire prediction.5 The signifi-

cance of these astral events was the subject of much discussion
in London.6 Newspapers offered updates about the phenomena
and astrologers received letters from interested citizens outlin-
ing what they had witnessed and requesting comment.7 If we are

5
The Prophecies, and Predictions, for London’s Deliverance (London, 1665). See also
the endorsements from John Booker, George Wharton and William Lilly in Edlyn,
Prae-Nuncius Sydereus, sig. A4v.
6
J. B., The Blazing Star, or, A Discourse of Comets, Their Natures and Effects
(London, 1665), 2.
7
See, for example, John Gadbury, De Cometis (London, 1665), 31–6; The Newes,
Published for Satisfaction and Information of the People (29 Dec. 1664), Issue 102; The
Intelligencer, Published for the Satisfaction and Information of the People (16 Jan. 1665),
Issue 5.
84 PAST AND PRESENT

to believe Daniel Defoe’s fictional account of the 1665 plague,

these astrological forecasts served only to frighten the people,
generating ‘universal melancholy’. The people were ‘addicted
to … Astrological Conjurations’, and prognosticators shrewdly
exploited the naivety of the masses by printing frightening
plague predictions in their copious almanacs.8 Astrologers, in
other words, were not only quacks — they were also unwelcome

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doomsayers.Yet astrologers like Edlyn claimed that the principal
aim of their plague predictions was simple and authentic: to give
the city ‘an Alarm to prepare for it, expect it, and provide against
it’.9 Indeed, astrologers affixed to their prognostications tools
for warding off disease, from prayers and at-home remedies to
referrals to specialist doctors. After all, as historians have exten-
sively demonstrated, medicine and astrology were intimately
linked in early modern Europe.10 The clients who poured into
astrologers’ consulting rooms sought advice on relationships,
travel, business, and, extensively, their health. For the purposes
of this article, however, what is significant about predictions like
Edlyn’s is the fact that they were not predicting the fortunes of
individual clients so much as they were forecasting the health of
the people of London as a body.
We now know a great deal about astrology’s role in the diagno-
sis, prognosis and treatment of early modern patients. However,
little attention has been paid to the attempts of astrologers to
forecast the health of large groups of people — cities, regions and
even nations. In fact, it is commonly assumed that pre-modern

8
Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (London, 1722), 25–6.
9
The Prophecie of One of his Maiesties Chaplains, Concerning the Plague (London,
1665), 1.
10
There is now a large literature on medical astrology in medieval and early
modern Europe. For England, see especially H. G. Dick, ‘Students of Physick and
Astrology: A Survey of Astrological Medicine in the Age of Science’, Journal of
the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, i, nos. 2 and 3 (1946); Roger French,
‘Foretelling the Future: Arabic Astrology and English Medicine in the Late Twelfth
Century’, Isis, lxxxvii (1996); Michael MacDonald, ‘The Career of Astrological
Medicine in England’, in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds.), Religio
Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1996);
Lauren Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman: Astrologer,
Alchemist, and Physician (Oxford, 2005). A digitized corpus of early modern
astrological case records, edited by Kassell, is provided by The Casebooks Project at
<https://casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk/>.
 PLAGUE AND PROGNOSTICATION 85
medicine was interested above all in the health of the individual
and rarely, if ever, looked beyond solitary case studies to con-
sider the broader health of groups.Yet astrologers routinely made
health predictions at the population level. The disease forecasts
of Edlyn and his colleagues about the year 1665 were, as this
article will show, neither new nor unique. Astrology, embedded
as it was in late medieval and early modern universities and

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courts, was a vibrant aspect of European cultural and intellec-
tual life until the eighteenth century.11 Following the directives
laid out in authoritative Greek and Arabic manuals, European
astrologers had since the twelfth century used the tools of their
trade to predict the illnesses that were likely to impact the health
of particular regions. From the fifteenth century onwards, these
predictions were made available in popular printed almanacs
across Europe. Astrological approaches to health at the pop-
ulation level had a history as old as astrology itself, but they
reached a high point in the early modern period, when the ver-
nacularization of astrology’s techniques enabled more people —
including those who did not attend university — to acquire the
requisite skills to practice the art, and the huge growth of cheap
print greatly amplified the dissemination of such prognostica-
tions throughout all levels of society.
Before the epidemiologist there was the astrologer, who looked
to the stars to find patterns between celestial configurations and
major health events on earth, and used their findings to forecast
the rise and fall of epidemics.This article showcases early modern
astrologers at work on health and disease at the population level.
An initial case study of a far broader, yet unstudied phenome-
non, the article focuses predominantly on seventeenth-century
England, a context for which we have a preponderance of sur-
viving evidence, but also one that witnessed significant innova-
tions in political arithmetic and population health more broadly.
Astrologers engaged in two key activities related to health at the
population level. First, astrologers used astronomical data and

11
For England, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York,
1971), chs. 10–12; Hilary M. Carey, Courting Disaster: Astrology at the English Court
and University in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1992); Ann Geneva, Astrology and
the Seventeenth Century Mind:William Lilly and the Language of the Stars (Manchester,
1995).
86 PAST AND PRESENT

astrological theories to make predictions about the diseases that

would predominate in a particular city in a particular year, dis-
seminating their forecasts widely alongside advice concerning
what should be done in response. While historians have studied
the general medical advice provided in almanacs, folding it into
a broader story about the vernacularization of medicine in the
period, the disease forecasts included in almanacs have been

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largely overlooked.12 Pestilence was of course far from the only
illness to plague early modern society, and astrologers’ yearly
forecasts accordingly ranged well beyond epidemics to consider
the relative risk of endemic disease. Implicit in these predictive
activities, I suggest, was a notion of ‘population’, one that had
much in common with medieval and Renaissance approaches
to the collective body of a city, but also foreshadowed import-
ant later developments in population thinking. Astrologers’ dis-
ease forecasts predicted different health outcomes for different
estates or subgroups in society, but they could also flatten social
hierarchies and establish equivalences between residents of a
city, effectively standardizing a large group of people.
Astrology was located at the intersection of medicine and
mathematics, and this alongside astrologers’ tendency to think
in terms of populations made it a fruitful tool for the large-
scale investigation of disease. Thus the second key activity of
astrologers related to population-level health was their efforts to
conduct empirical analyses of the patterns of epidemics, using
historical and astronomical evidence in an attempt to identify
determinants of disease at the group level. By comparing the
timing and severity of plague outbreaks with the stars, astrol-
ogers sought to detect patterns that would shed light on the
precise causes of plague and ultimately make for more evi-
dence-based disease forecasts. Astrologers’ interests in health

12
For astrology and vernacular medicine in England, see Louise Hill Curth,
English Almanacs, Astrology and Popular Medicine, 1550–1700 (Manchester, 2018);
Bernard Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs, 1500–1800 (Ithaca,
1979), 204–14. Similar studies on other European contexts include: Kelly M. Smith,
‘The Science of Astrology: Schreibkalender, Natural Philosophy, and Everyday Life in
the Seventeenth-Century German Lands’ (Univ. of Cincinnati Ph.D. thesis, 2018),
ch. 4; Thomas A. Horrocks, Popular Print and Popular Medicine: Almanacs and Health
Advice in Early America (Amherst, 2008); Jeroen Salman, Populair drukwerk in de
Gouden Eeuw: De almanak als lectuur en handelswaar (Zutphen, 1999), esp. 105–34.
 PLAGUE AND PROGNOSTICATION 87
at the population level, combined with their long-standing
attempts to draw lessons from the correlation of past events
with astrological phenomena, made them prime candidates for
developing novel approaches to epidemics — even if the same
techniques could ultimately help to undermine many of the
astrological theories that first motivated them.
Before diving into the world of early modern astrology, it is

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salutary to remind ourselves that while astrology is today often
associated with magic, for much of its history it was more
closely tied to mathematics and medicine. Into the seventeenth
century, astrology — which sat alongside astronomy as the prac-
tical part of the ‘science of the stars’ — was taught in mathe-
matics, medicine, and natural philosophy courses at universities
throughout Europe.13 Throughout the early modern period cer-
tain types of astrology were increasingly viewed as suspect by
theologians and natural philosophers, but the use of astrology
for medicine, agriculture and navigation was treated differently
by churches and universities.14 Astrological approaches to med-
icine remained widespread in Europe even into the eighteenth
century, especially amongst the broader public.15 Thus, not only
were astrologers deeply interested in making predictions and
recommendations about health and disease at the population
level; they were also widely regarded as key experts in this aspect
of health care. In an era before mathematical probability and

13
See now H. Darrel Rutkin, Sapientia Astrologica: Astrology, Magic and Natural
Knowledge, c.1250–1800. I. Medieval Structures, 1250–1500: Conceptual, Institutional,
Socio-Political, Theologico-Religious and Cultural (Cham, 2019).
14
See, for example, H. Darrel Rutkin, ‘Is Astrology a Type of Divination?
Thomas Aquinas, the Index of Prohibited Books, and the Construction of a
Legitimate Astrology in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance’, International Journal
of Divination and Prognostication, i (2019); Luís Campos Ribeiro, ‘The Bounded
Heavens: Defining the Limits of Astrological Practice in the Iberian Indices’, Annals
of Science, lxxvii (2020); Neil Tarrant, ‘Reconstructing Thomist Astrology: Robert
Bellarmine and the Papal Bull Coeli et terrae’, Annals of Science, lxxvii (2020);
Hannah Marcus, Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early
Modern Italy (Chicago, 2020), esp. 57–8. Note that the distinction between natural
and judicial astrology common in much of the historiography is of limited use when
talking of the period before the eighteenth century; although a distinction certainly
existed, the above studies show it was always unclear how to define it.
15
The declining reputation of astrology in early modern Europe remains an
area of active research. We know especially little about how and why astrology was
gradually removed from the medical curricula of universities.
88 PAST AND PRESENT

statistical analysis, astrologers used the best quantitative tools

then available to predict and monitor the incidence of disease at
the population level.

I
As the Roman astrologer Claudius Ptolemy explained in his text-

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book Tetrabiblos, which was composed in the mid second century
ce but remained authoritative into the early modern period, the
movements of the heavenly bodies, in relation to each other and
to the signs of the Zodiac, exert powerful influences on the ter-
restrial sphere. Planets incite injury and disease in bodies, and by
cultivating accurate knowledge of planetary configurations, one
could unite astrology and medicine to provide diagnoses, progno-
ses and appropriate treatments.16 Bolstered by the work of Arabic
astrologers, these basic tenets, combined with the principles of
Galenic medicine, remained a central facet of mainstream med-
ical theory and practice in Europe from the late medieval period
into the eighteenth century. Health was determined by the balance
of the four humours, the constant permutations of which were
guided by the movement of the planets, which imparted vary-
ing quantities of heat, cold, dryness and moisture. An individual’s
predisposition to certain diseases was partly a product of the con-
figuration of the heavens at their birth and could be analysed on
a nativity chart. The heavens also defined propitious and inaus-
picious times to perform therapeutic procedures such as purges,
fasting and bleeding, as well as the collection, compounding and
administration of drugs.17 Astrology was considered so indispens-
able to the practice of medicine that in the fifteenth century some

16
Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, i, 2, i, 3, iii, 12.
17
For examples of these theories in action, see Anthony Grafton and Nancy
Siraisi, ‘Between the Election and My Hopes: Girolamo Cardano and Medical
Astrology’, in William Newman and Anthony Grafton (eds.), Secrets of Nature:
Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2001); Hilary M.
Carey, ‘Astrological Medicine and the Medieval English Folded Almanac’, Social
History of Medicine, xvii (2004); Monica Azzolini, The Duke and the Stars: Astrology
and Politics in Renaissance Milan (Cambridge, MA, 2013), ch. 4; E. W. Talbert, ‘The
Notebook of a Fifteenth-Century Practicing Physician’, Studies in English, xxii
(1942).
 PLAGUE AND PROGNOSTICATION 89
European universities decreed that physicians must always have
on hand a copy of the current almanac to guide their practice.18
Yet astrologers were specialists not only in the health of indi-
viduals, but also the health of large groups. Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos
described two main types of prognostication: one relating to
particular persons, and the other to whole races, cities or coun-
tries.19 The latter more ‘general’ inquiry, which facilitated pre-

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dictions about population-level events, was generally considered
less controversial than the former, which was often seen as overly
deterministic and in contradiction to the principle of free will.20
General astrology was concerned with large-scale phenomena,
wars as well as famine, drought, weather events, natural disasters
and epidemics. In a society where the assumptions underlying
general astrology were largely taken for granted, the value of such
predictions was obvious, and it is no surprise that astrologers had
long been crucial advisors in royal and princely courts, in the
Ottoman Empire as well as throughout Europe.21 From the late
fifteenth century it was a requirement for professors of Astronomy

18
Ian Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance: The Case of Learned
Medicine (Cambridge, 2002), 91. Similar instructions existed for surgical guilds; see
Salman, Populair drukwerk in de Gouden Eeuw, 109, 115–16, 122.
19
Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, iii, 1.
20
For instance, Francis Bacon’s reformed astrology affirmed that general
astrology was sounder than other astrological techniques and that practitioners
could legitimately make predictions about droughts, famines, frosts, rains, wars and
epidemics. See De augmentis scientiarum (London, 1623, STC 1108), iii, 4. Note,
however, that after Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s famous critiques, conjunctionist
astrology was often attacked as unreliable pagan accretion. See Dag Nikolaus Hasse,
Success and Suppression: Arabic Sciences and Philosophy in the Renaissance (Cambridge,
MA, 2016), 276–89.
21
Azzolini, Duke and the Stars; Darin Hayton, The Crown and the Cosmos: Astrology
and the Politics of Maximilian I (Pittsburgh, 2015); Michael A. Ryan, A Kingdom
of Stargazers: Astrology and Authority in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon (Ithaca,
2012); Michael H. Shank, ‘Academic Consulting in Fifteenth-Century Vienna: The
Case of Astrology’, in John Murdoch, Edith Sylla and Michael McVaugh (eds.),
Texts and Contexts in Ancient and Medieval Science (Leiden, 1997); Steven Vanden
Broecke, The Limits of Influence: Pico, Louvain, and the Crisis of Renaissance Astrology
(Leiden, 2003), ch. 2; Ahmet Tunç Şen, ‘Astrology in the Service of the Empire:
Knowledge, Prognostication, and Politics at the Ottoman Court, 1450s–1550s’
(Univ. of Chicago Ph.D. thesis, 2016); Jean-Patrice Boudet, ‘Les Astrologues
européens et la genèse de l’État moderne (XIIe–XVIIe s.): une première approche’,
in L’Etat moderne et les élites, XIIIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1996). For England, see
Carey, Courting Disaster; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 342–5, 371.
90 PAST AND PRESENT

and Mathematics in many European universities to provide yearly

predictions, based on general astrology, for the local area.22
The key interpretive technique here was the horoscope for the
revolution of the year, which mapped the heavens at the sun’s
annual entrance into the first degree of Aries in March (at the
spring equinox).23 The astrologer analysed the horoscope, taking
into consideration the particular influence of the planet designated

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‘lord’ of the year. As Edlyn’s case suggests, planetary conjunctions
that were present in the revolution horoscope or set to take place
at any point throughout the year were also vital to consider, as well
as eclipses and comets.24 Each of the planets and luminaries (then
known), twelve signs, and twelve houses of the horoscope were
coupled with particular diseases, and astrologers drew on these
associations when prognosticating. Richard Trewythian’s prognos-
tication for London in 1452, for example, took Saturn’s location
in the sixth house –– the house of health –– to mean that the year
would witness diseases of a cold and dry nature, such as madness,
epilepsy and leprosy.25 Rooted in this approach was a concern with
the connection between location and health; the casting of a horo-
scope, effectively a map of the sky as seen from the perspective of
a particular time and place on earth, relied on the data collated in
astronomical tables like those used by Edlyn, which were calcu-
lated for a discrete geographical location.26
22
Rutkin, Sapientia Astrologica, 391–3; Vanden Broecke, Limits of Influence,
32; Alexandre Tur, ‘Hora introitus solis in Arietem: les prédictions astrologiques
annuelles latines dans l’Europe du XVe siècle, 1405–1484’ (Université d’Orléans
Ph.D. thesis, 2018), 282–5.
23
The revolution horoscope marked the beginning of spring, and astrologers
could cast similar figures for summer, autumn and winter, based on the sun’s
entrance into Cancer, Libra, and Capricorn, respectively. It was considered best
practice under certain astronomical conditions to make yearly predictions based on
all four seasonal charts.
24
Astronomically, Saturn and Jupiter conjunct roughly every twenty years,
meeting in the same Zodiac triplicity for twelve or thirteen conjunctions (about
240 years) before moving to the next. Conjunctions of the superior planets signified
transformations in society, the most momentous changes coming with Greater
Conjunctions (the first conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in a new triplicity) and
Greatest Conjunctions (when, after moving through all the triplicities, Saturn and
Jupiter meet again in Aries).
25
Sophie Page, ‘Richard Trewythian and the Uses of Astrology in Late Medieval
England’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, lxiv (2001), 203.
26
Most English almanacs were calculated for London, though regional titles
increasingly flourished.
 PLAGUE AND PROGNOSTICATION 91
With the growth of print, annual prognostications spread
more extensively than ever before. Although prognostications
were often printed as standalone texts, the principal medium
that enabled the spread of disease forecasts was the annual
almanac.27 Reminiscent of the modern pocket diary, almanacs
contained an astronomical calendar alongside reference mate-
rials such as dates of local fairs and tables of weights and mea-

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sures. Almanacs are frequently associated with the religious and
political movements to which they often contributed.28 Yet at
their core almanacs were reference texts consulted for practi-
cal advice on almost every aspect of life — especially health.
Almanacs contained large amounts of general medico-astrolog-
ical guidance. This included folk remedies and, occasionally,
Paracelsian ideas, but Louise Curth has shown that English
almanacs were for the most part Galenic, providing extensive
guidance on balancing the humours through the regulation of
the six non-naturals (food and drink; rest and exercise; sleep
and waking; excretions and retentions; ambient air; and the
passions).29 Almanacs’ use of images and recognizable symbols
also made them accessible to those with less literacy. The most
common image was the Zodiac Man, a depiction of a (usually)
male body illustrating the signs governing each body part. As
the example in Plate 2 indicates, this standardized figure gave
life to the theory that it was dangerous to perform surgery on a
specific organ when the moon was in the sign ruling that part.
Written in English rather than Latin from the mid fifteenth cen-
tury onwards, almanacs were an effective means of populariz-
ing medical knowledge.30 In his first almanac, printed for 1684,
27
The best introduction remains Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press.
28
For England, see William E. Burns, ‘Astrology and Politics in Seventeenth-
Century England: King James II and the Almanac Men’, Seventeenth Century,
xx (2005); Patrick Curry, Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England
(Princeton, 1989).
29
Curth, English Almanacs, Astrology and Popular Medicine, esp. chs. 6–8.
30
See n. 12 above. It is notable, however, that many classic studies of popular English
medicine explicitly exclude almanacs. See Mary E. Fissell, ‘The Marketplace of Print’,
in Mark S. R. Jenner and Patrick Wallis (eds.), Medicine and the Market in England and
its Colonies, c.1450–c.1850 (Basingstoke, 2007), 111; Mary E. Fissell, ‘Popular Medical
Writing’, in Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, 6 vols.
(Oxford, 2011), i, 418; Paul Slack, ‘Mirrors of Health and Treasures of Poor Men:
The Uses of the Vernacular Medical Literature of Tudor England’, in Charles Webster
(ed.), Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1979), 283.
92 PAST AND PRESENT

the astrologer–physician William Salmon announced that he

had ‘laboured to make it serviceable to the Common people, in
such things as may contribute to their Healths’; he endeavoured
to ‘accommodate’ the complexities of medical astrology ‘with
many plain Directions fit for the capacity of the vulgar’, includ-
ing ‘Medicaments … [they] may make themselves’.31
Beyond this general advice, almanacs included a prognostica-

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tion that provided a report on the state of the local communi-
ty’s health for the coming year and the risk of major epidemics.
Some of this advice was based on standard weather patterns.
Thomas Balles’s 1631 almanac warned that the diseases associ-
ated with winter included melancholy. To avoid this particular
ailment, one should be careful not to eat ‘over-moyste’ food.32
Others based their health predictions on the sun’s monthly
position. In his almanac for 1606, Henry Alleyn explained to
the people in the town of Petworth in Sussex that in January,
the sun would enter Aquarius, a masculine, airy and sanguine
sign governing the legs. One should therefore be wary of swol-
len legs. In February, meanwhile, the sun would enter Pisces,
a feminine, watery and phlegmatic sign ruling the feet, and
thus readers should anticipate gout, leprosy and palsy.33 Most
predictions were based on insights drawn from the revolution
horoscope, however. A forecast offered to English readers by
Mathias Brothyel for the year 1545 predicted that, concerning
‘the infyrmyties, diseases & plages … that shal reygne this yere’,
there would be ‘sondrye kyndes’. In particular, the positions of
Mars and Saturn meant one should expect ‘burnynge diseases’
such as ‘feuers or agues, many aches in the head, necke, and in
the eyes, and also impostumes, pluryses or stitches’.34 Over a
century later, William Andrews’ almanac for 1655 noted that
Mars’s position in Capricorn at the cusp of the sixth house
of the horoscope meant ‘we must undoubtedly expect violent
pestilential diseases’, including ‘the Plague, small Pox, burning

31
William Salmon, Salmon’s Almanack (London, 1684), sig. a2r.
32
Thomas Balles, A New Almanacke and Prognostication (London, 1631, STC
411), sig. b3r.
33
Henry Alleyn, An Almanack and Prognostication (London, 1606, STC 408),
sigs. b5v–b6r.
34
Mathias Brothyel, A Pronostycacyon (London, 1545, STC 420.15), sigs. c1r–c2r.
 PLAGUE AND PROGNOSTICATION 93

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2. A Zodiac Man, with accompanying textual details, in a seventeenth-century

almanac. Source: The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Bodl. Ashm.
597(2): John Gadbury, Ephemeris (London, 1655), sig. c8v.
94 PAST AND PRESENT

Fevers, and many other infectious diseases’ that would kill thou-
sands.35 Yet far from being mere doomsayers, astrologers would
often predict no epidemic in a given year. As Lilly claimed in his
almanac for 1647, that year would thankfully see no ‘Plague or
generall Pestilence’.36
Almanacs also forecast the relative prevalence of endemic dis-
ease. The astrologer Thomas Langley used seasonal horoscopes to

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claim that the spring of 1635 would bring fevers, ring worm, cor-
rupt blood and measles, and that premature births and weakened
infants were also probable.37 Mental as well as physical ailments
were included in these predictions. Being a cold and dry disease,
melancholy was generally associated with winter, but it was also
linked with Saturn and the signs Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn.
Hence Gadbury predicted melancholy to rage in 1657 because the
moon was in Taurus in the sixth house, and again in 1684 because
of the position of Saturn.38 The nature of each planet and sign
was crucial to these predictions. In his discussion of the revolution
horoscope for 1675, Gadbury explained that the relative positions
of Jupiter and Mars, the first of which governed the lungs and
liver, the second of which governed the gall, meant that one should
expect diseases in those body parts. Mars being hot and dry meant
a particular ailment to watch out for was obstructed and dried-up
lungs.39 The heavens could also encourage behaviours that would
lead to the spread of disease. Nicholas Culpeper’s almanac for
1653 claimed that Venus’s position as lady of the year in the rev-
olution horoscope meant ‘women will be much given to lie back-
ward’, leading ultimately to a rise in sexually transmitted disease.40
Alongside their predictions, astrologers offered practical tips to
mitigate the severity of the outbreaks they forecast. Sometimes,
especially in the case of epidemics, astrologers encouraged
readers simply to pray for God’s mercy or, following Jeremiah
10:2, to trust God rather than fear ‘the signs of heaven’. Part

35
William Andrews, The Coelestial Observator (London, 1655), sigs. b4r–v.
36
William Lilly, Merlini Anglici Ephemeris (London, 1647), sig. f8r.
37
Thomas Langley, A New Almanacke and Prognostication (London, 1635, STC
479), sig. b3r.
38
John Gadbury, Speculum Astrologicum (London, 1657), sig. c5v; John Gadbury,
Ephemeris (London, 1684), sig. a7r.
39
John Gadbury, Ephemeris (London, 1675), sigs. d1v–d2r.
40
Nicholas Culpeper, An Ephemeris (London, 1653), 13.
 PLAGUE AND PROGNOSTICATION 95
of the aim of prognostications was in this sense pastoral and
natural theological; by revealing how God used the heavens as
his instruments, astrologers hoped to cultivate appreciation of
divine governance of the world.41 Yet for the most part astrolo-
gers stressed that the stars incline, but they do not compel (astra
inclinant, sed non obligant), and thus prognostications were usu-
ally not intended as fatalistic but instead as accounts of future

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trends that could be assuaged with proper conduct. Culpeper
reminded his readers in 1653 that although ‘fatality rules fools,
wise men rule the Stars, while they govern themselves by sound
counsel’. Thus, when Culpeper alerted his readers of ‘a mor-
tal Summer’ that year, ‘very destructive to the Commonalities
lives’, he encouraged the reader not to ‘keep his brain in his
books’, but instead to seek out remedies ‘in time’. He also pre-
dicted the arrival of ‘a new and unheard of Disease’ in the win-
ter of the same year, advising readers that Amara dulcis would
be ‘an excellent Herb at this time’, one that should be procured
‘before-hand’ in case ‘when it is needful it is not to be had’.42
The aim was to equip laypeople with the health literacy they
needed to respond effectively to the forecast. For this, readers
could also draw on the general medical advice that appeared
throughout their almanac. Within Galenic medicine, a certain
amount of personal responsibility for one’s health was assumed.
Although there were aspects of one’s humoural make-up that
could not be altered, individuals could nevertheless work to
bring their humours into balance by regulating the six non-nat-
urals. For instance, one could work to counteract the predicted
risk of a hot and dry disease such as a fever by taking cold baths.
Part of this also involved the aid of medical practitioners, and
astrologers often encouraged readers to visit experts — includ-
ing, at times, themselves — who specialized in the forecast dis-
eases or sold proprietary drugs. When Culpeper predicted much
‘suppression of Menses’ (pregnancy) in the year 1654, he gave
advice on abortifacients and offered women ‘[his] house, where

41
In the middle decades of the seventeenth century, a group of English astrologers
sponsored a series of sermons that addressed this topic. See Michelle Pfeffer, ‘The
Society of Astrologers, c.1647–1684: Sermons, Feasts and the Resuscitation of
Astrology in Seventeenth-Century London’, British Journal for the History of Science,
liv (2021).
42
Culpeper, Ephemeris (1653), 6, 19, 23.
96 PAST AND PRESENT

you shall have them prepared and administered by my friend Dr

Harrington’.43 Gadbury predicted consumption, dropsy, gonor-
rhoea, ‘stranguary’, and corruptions of the liver and pancreas
in 1680, but, luckily for his readers, advertised a ‘Universal
Pill’ claiming to cure many of these ailments.44 In 1673, he pre-
dicted ‘raging distempers’ in the body ‘too hard and knotty even
for many learned Physicians, unacquainted with Astrology, to

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understand’. The solution? Visit Gadbury at his rooms in Brick
Court, Westminster.45
Although we know what astrologers advised their readers to
do, little evidence is available to shed light on how readers actu-
ally responded. We know that extraordinary astrological predic-
tions often caused a significant public response in early modern
Europe.46 After dire predictions about Black Monday, the solar
eclipse of March 1652 — which was predicted to bring treach-
ery, disputes, invasion, earthquakes and pestilence — many in
London stopped turning up to work and the rich left for the
countryside.47 It is possible that annual disease predictions
encouraged some to leave the city early in search of safe ref-
uge in the country, as was common practice in times of plague,
even though, as below, not every astrologer thought this was
a good idea.48 Presumably some readers followed astrologers’
advice to alleviate incoming disease through regimen, appro-
priate cures and the attention of expert practitioners. After all,
the recognizable trope of the almanac reader, who based their

43
Nicholas Culpeper, An Ephemeris (London, 1654), 9–11.
44
John Gadbury, Ephemeris (London, 1680), sigs. b3r, c8v.
45
John Gadbury, Ephemeris (London, 1673), sigs. b5r–v.
46
The most famous early modern example is the predicted ‘flood’ of 1524, based
on a conjunction in the watery sign Pisces. On astrology and early modern approaches
to ‘disasters’, see Louis Gerdelan, ‘Calamitous Knowledge: Disaster Research in the
British, French and Spanish Atlantic Worlds, c.1605–1755’ (Harvard Univ. Ph.D. thesis,
2021), ch. 3. I am grateful to Louis Gerdelan for sharing his dissertation with me.
47
William E. Burns, ‘ “The Terriblest Eclipse that Hath Been Seen in Our Days”:
Black Monday and the Debate on Astrology during the Interregnum’, in Margaret
J. Osler (ed.), Rethinking the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, 2000).
48
The popular fifteenth-century Latin translation and abridgement of Abû
Ma’shar’s Introduction to Astronomy explained that foreknowledge gave one time
to flee or to prepare the body. See Steven Vanden Broecke, ‘Self-Governance and
the Body Politic in Renaissance Annual Prognostications’, in Charles Burnett and
Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum (eds.), From Māshāʾallāh to Kepler: Theory and Practice
in Medieval and Renaissance Astrology (Ceredigion, 2015), 498.
 PLAGUE AND PROGNOSTICATION 97
everyday decisions on their almanac, was ubiquitous in English
plays, poems and parodies.49 Guidebooks likewise pointed to
the apparently common practice of ‘Poore Countreymen’,
who habitually followed ‘the direct rules of [their] Almanack,
eyther for Phlebotomie, or other directions for the health of the
body’.50 Given the habitual, quotidian nature of these activities,
however, little evidence has survived. As Curth has suggested in

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regard to the general medical guidance of almanacs, most read-
ers probably did not follow astrologers’ advice slavishly but, as
with other genres of regimen, would pick and choose elements
that seemed beneficial or achievable.51
Although there are considerable evidentiary difficulties in
tracing the use of almanacs’ disease predictions, the ubiquity
of this content throughout the entire early modern period is
indicative of its perceived value in the eyes of almanac-makers
and their publishers and consequently their purchasers. After
all, the standardized format of almanacs meant that astrologers
were perpetually short on space and routinely complained that
they had run out of room to deliver their prognostications in
more detail. Moreover, other evidence points to extensive reader
engagement: extant annotated almanacs show that many used
them as a diary, composing life records in dialogue with the
astrological content, noting the weather, births and deaths in
the family, and, importantly, health and sickness.52 The clergy-
man Matthew Page, for instance, used his almanac for 1612 to
record the ill health of his infant son, his wife’s painful breasts,
and his own loss of a tooth.53 Astrologers also received vast

49
See, for example, Thomas Shadwell, A True Widow: A Comedy, Acted by the
Duke’s Servants (London, 1679), sig. a4r; Thomas Middleton, The Counterfeit
Bridegroom, or, The Defeated Widow. A Comedy (London, 1677), 5–6. I am grateful to
Paige Donaghy for the second reference.
50
A Helpe to Discourse (London, 1619, STC 1547), 270–2.
51
Curth, English Almanacs, Astrology and Popular Medicine, 137–8.
52
Adam Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2010), ch.
1; Jason Scott-Warren, ‘Early Modern Bookkeeping and Life-Writing Revisited:
Accounting for Richard Stonley’, in Liesbeth Corens, Kate Peters and Alexandra
Walsham (eds.), The Social History of the Archive: Record-Keeping in Early Modern
Europe (Past and Present Supplement no. 11, Oxford, 2016), 157–9.
53
Lauren Kassell, ‘Almanacs and Prognostications’, in Raymond (ed.), Oxford
History of Popular Print Culture, i, 436.
98 PAST AND PRESENT

numbers of letters from readers asking questions about their

predictions and requesting further guidance.54 Indeed, it must
be stressed that these forecasts were not the ramblings of eccen-
tric outsiders, marginalized voices ignored by the majority. On
the contrary, almanacs were one of the most successful genres
of the period. At their highest point in the 1660s, sales aver-
aged between 350,000 and 400,000 annually in England, out-

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selling all other types of books.55 The fact that astrologers often
made predictions that did not come to pass did not significantly
impact almanac sales. As an art dealing with complex and vari-
able materials, astrology had long been conceived as a form of
educated guesswork.56 It was common to blame an ‘artist’ rather
than the art itself. Moreover, errors could buttress the system,
as the reaction to an incorrect prediction was often to turn to
another almanac for better advice.57 One of the first forms of
mass media, almanacs were arguably the most accessible con-
duit for information about population-level health in the early
modern period.

II
Given the strong ties between astrology and pre-modern pol-
itics, it is striking to modern eyes that, as the above examples
suggest, the instructions astrologers offered in their almanacs to
allay population-level health threats were centred on individual,
rather than state or community, action. We are accustomed to
associating interest in population-level health — and in ‘pop-
ulation’ and ‘populations’ more generally — with the modern

54
A substantial tranche of such letters for the mid seventeenth century is preserved
in the Ashmole papers in the Bodleian Library. Many letters were also printed in
almanacs themselves. Gadbury received so many that he warned his correspondents
he would only respond to those who pre-paid postage: Ephemeris (London, 1665),
sig. a1v. William Salmon claimed to receive 1,500 to 1,600 yearly: London Almanac
(London, 1704), sig. c8v.
55
Cyprian Blagden, The Stationers’ Company: A History, 1403–1959 (London,
1960), 188.
56
See, for example, James Allen, ‘Failure and Expertise in the Ancient Conception
of an Art’, in Tamara Horowitz and Allen I. Janis (eds.), Scientific Failure (Lanham,
MD, 1994). It was also common to buy multiple almanacs and compare them. See
Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 353.
57
Ibid., 397–402.
 PLAGUE AND PROGNOSTICATION 99
activity of governments and state actors.58 It is clear from the
above that the close interaction between the state and popula-
tion statistics that we see from the eighteenth century onwards
was not in play in early modern astrological practice.59 The sug-
gestions astrologers offered in their printed almanacs for deal-
ing with impending health threats were not ultimately directed
at government authorities. To take a modern analogy, almanac

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prognostications functioned more like WHO press releases con-
taining guidance for the public than reports with advice for state
administrators. There are two main reasons for this. First, many
early modern astrologers argued that there was little that gov-
ernments could or should do about epidemic disease. Simon
Forman maintained that quarantine only caused fear amongst
those shut up in their homes, leading to disordered humours
and thus increased susceptibility to infection. As was common-
place, he argued that the solution to plague was moral: peni-
tence, rather than confinement or flight from the city, was the
best response.60 Gadbury similarly saw quarantine and escape
from the city as misguided attempts to evade God’s wrath and
‘baffle Celestial destiny’.61 Second, the change in audience that
came with the popularization of general astrology in cheap print
demanded a change in the type of guidance that was offered.
In earlier prognosticatory culture, predictions based on general
astrology were primarily directed to members of courts and uni-
versities and were heard by few beyond these elite circles.62 It

58
Following Foucault in particular, there has been a tendency to assume
a constitutive relationship between the state and its statistics, and to link
population-level health with ‘governmentality’ and ‘biopower’, by which Foucault
meant the efforts of governments and institutions to regulate and control the
biological features of populations. See, especially, Michel Foucault, Sécurité,
territoire, population: Cours au Collège de France, 1977–78 (Paris, 2004).
59
Joanna Innes, Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Eighteenth-
Century Britain (Oxford, 2009); D. V. Glass, Numbering the People: The Eighteenth-
Century Population Controversy and the Development of Census and Vital Statistics in
Britain (Farnborough, 1973).
60
Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London, 111.
61
John Gadbury, London’s Deliverance Predicted (London, 1665), 29 and passim.
He knew both also impacted trade. See ibid., sigs. A4r–v, 19, 29–30.
62
Despite the near ubiquity of astrologers in these elite pre-modern spaces, the
extent to which astrological guidance of any kind was put to use by the state varied
according to the predilections of rulers. See the various case studies of English
monarchs in Carey, Courting Disaster.
100 PAST AND PRESENT

is true that in England as elsewhere, many of the earliest alma-

nacs were produced at the behest of the Crown or local council
officials, and some city councils and regional parliaments made
bulk annual purchases of almanacs.63 But almanacs were ulti-
mately mass-produced, public-facing documents whose pri-
mary audience was the reading public.
In the mid 1650s, one almanac compiler claimed that the

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many ‘thanks’ he had received for an earlier disease forecast
meant he would not be ‘sparing to deliver my Judgement …
for the publique good, what Diseases are like to reign, and what
may be applicable for them that shall be afflicted with them’.64
As this quotation suggests, astrologers’ emphasis on individual
action should not detract from their concern with the well-be-
ing of their city as a whole nor their ability to think and work at
the population level. In this case, individual-level guidance was
issued for the sake of the collective and, indeed, for the ‘popu-
lation’ at large — and hence ‘for the publique good’. After all,
the success of any programme of population health has always
relied on the collaboration and complicity of individuals who
take action for the benefit of the larger group. In comparison
to the bespoke guidance astrologers offered in their clinics to
individual patients, the guidelines in almanacs were not indi-
viduated medical advice tailored to the particular humoural
or astrological characteristics of each reader. On the contrary,
almanacs were directed to unindividuated ‘everymen’, who were
the object of astrologers’ guidance insofar as they were residents
in the city under consideration and could therefore contribute
to the health of the whole.65 Astrologers certainly worked within
classical and humanist ideals of the body politic as made up of
linked and hierarchical social estates, treating their readers as
members of subgroups sorted by age, confession, affluence and
other categories. Yet general astrology also allowed practitioners

63
William Parron, composer of the earliest surviving English almanacs, wrote
them primarily for the use of Henry VII: Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press, 67.
See also Vanden Broecke, Limits of Influence, 31; Salman, Populair drukwerk in de
Gouden Eeuw, esp. 57.
64
Nicholas Culpeper, An Ephemeris (London, 1655), 8, my emphasis. Culpeper
died in January 1654 but the Stationers’ Company paid another astrologer to
continue to issue almanacs under his name.
65
On ideal almanac readers as individual ‘everymen’, see Vanden Broecke in ‘Self-
Governance and the Body Politic in Renaissance Annual Prognostications’, 510.
 PLAGUE AND PROGNOSTICATION 101
to see the inhabitants of a region, regardless of social status, as
part of a relatively standardized group: a collection of mortal
bodies.
Within astrological and Galenic medicine, health was a com-
munity project in which everyone contributed. The responsi-
bility for action in response to disease forecasts thus lay with
residents, who could repent and ask for God’s protection as well

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as — especially in the face of endemic disease — monitor their
bodies and behaviour. They were seen as possessing responsibil-
ity for their health; more importantly, through the management
of their own bodies they contributed to the overall health of
the local community. Steven Vanden Broecke has argued simi-
larly for Renaissance prognostications more generally: the ideal
reader identified themselves in relation to the social body of
which they were a part, and in response to predictions orga-
nized their behaviour to ensure that good fortune would reign in
their city.66 Such forecasts were thus issued, in the words of one
English astrologer, ‘for the profit of the Republicke’.67
We can see similar assumptions at work in pre-modern
attempts to maintain and manage the health of cities across
Europe. The foundation of urban hospitals, leprosaria and quar-
antine facilities in medieval and Renaissance municipalities —
as well as the implementation of strategies for managing waste
and pollution and the appointment of plague commissioners
and boards of health — were often state-sponsored measures
for protecting and promoting residents’ health.68 Yet a consider-
able responsibility still lay with individual residents and visitors
within a given city, who were expected to act for the benefit of
the body politic. To name just a few examples, residents were
variously tasked with ensuring the cleanliness of their homes
and nearby streets and waterways, with disposing of their waste

66
Ibid., esp. 506–10. Similar points are made in Jeroen Salman, ‘Information,
éducation et distraction dans les almanachs hollandais au XVIIe siècle’, in Hans-
Jürgen Lüsebrink (ed.), Les Lectures du peuple en Europe et dans les Amériques du XVIIe
au XXe siècle (Brussels, 2003).
67
An Ephemeris for Nine Yeeres (London, 1609, STC 22142), sig. a2r.
68
There is a growing literature on pre-modern population-level health care. For
an overview, see Guy Geltner, ‘Public Health and the Pre-Modern City: A Research
Agenda’, History Compass, x (2012).
102 PAST AND PRESENT

properly, and with keeping animals prudently and hygieni-

cally.69 If they failed to do so, all inhabitants were impacted.
The Galenic emphasis on the six non-naturals meant that in
taking action to improve the local environment (especially, of
course, the air), individuals could improve health at an individ-
ual as well as a group level.70 This approach to population-level
health fitted well with reigning ideas of society as a living body,

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one in which authorities had a certain amount of responsibility
over the group while inhabitants were expected to support their
efforts. Not every part of the body politic was of equal rank, but
every estate had its own part to play for the benefit of all.71
Early modern astrology largely operated within the same par-
adigm. The individuals who were expected to act in response
to prognostications were themselves part of multiple, overlap-
ping social estates that together composed the body politic. It
is for this reason that when astrologers prognosticated, they
often made specific predictions regarding particular estates or
subgroups. Here astrologers relied on late medieval theories
about planetary rulership, according to which different classes
of people — men or women; young or old; rich or poor; but
also lawyers, soldiers or fishermen; Protestants, Catholics or
Jews — were said to be governed by different parts of the heav-
ens.72 Health forecasts broke down the residents of a place by
age, gender, and temperament, as well as by class, occupation,
and confession. For example, Culpeper predicted that certain
astrological conditions in 1652 meant that ‘Epidemical Disease
will arise amongst the Clergy and Lawyers’ in particular. Other
celestial configurations meant the ‘Vulgar’ would likely ‘hasten
their ends by ill dyet’. The positions of Venus and Mars, further-
more, would see men much ‘given to Lechery’, resulting in the

69
Carole Rawcliffe, Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns
and Cities (Woodbridge, 2013), ch. 3; Guy Geltner, Roads to Health: Infrastructure
and Urban Wellbeing in Later Medieval Italy (Philadelphia, 2019), ch. 1 and appendix
I; Janna Coomans, Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval
Low Countries (Cambridge, 2021), ch. 4.
70
Coomans, Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low
Countries, ch. 1.
71
Ibid., 254–7; Rawcliffe, Urban Bodies, 78–89.
72
See, for example, the rules for prognosticating different estates in Nicholas
Culpeper, An Ephemeris (London, 1654), 27–8.
 PLAGUE AND PROGNOSTICATION 103
spread of the Pox.73 As was standard, general predictions about
the fate of the ‘rich’ (or ‘princes’) often differed from predic-
tions about the ‘vulgar’. Age also mattered: in his almanac for
1684, Gadbury predicted that in April the positions of Saturn
and Mars meant ‘many elderly Persons will dye’.74 People who
shared humoural dispositions (sanguine, cholerick, melancholic,
or phlegmatic) were also more likely to fall prey to certain types

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of diseases, and so could be grouped together in forecasts.75 The
same went for those living in particular environments. William
Andrews claimed that in 1670 the position of Saturn indicated
that melancholy would afflict many people living in the coun-
tryside. Meanwhile, ‘strange colds, coughs, and consumptions’
were likely amongst those who lived in ‘moist, Moorish & fenny
places’.76 Thus, in a given year, a resident could be liable to one
disease as a man, another as a lawyer, and yet another because
of his temperament. Although astrologers divided society into
different estates, their reliance on ‘biological’ categories like age
and temperament did not map neatly onto the social estates
traditionally thought to make up the body politic. Instead, in
grouping residents into these categories, astrologers essentially
treated them as unindividuated members of subpopulations
within a larger group.
Almanacs thus variously privileged (or disadvantaged) dif-
ferent groups according to astrologically based characteristics.
However, general astrology could also flatten social hierarchies
and homogenize populations, prognosticating the health of
entire cities or towns and making no distinction between dif-
ferences of rank, gender or confession amongst residents. When
the author of The London Almanack came to make predictions
for January 1673, for example, they explained that the position
of Jupiter would impact all ‘the worthy Inhabitants’ of London.77
These predictive practices drew on long-held theories that were
laid out in authoritative works on general astrology. The deeply

73
Nicholas Culpeper, An Ephemeris (London, 1652), 23–4.
74
John Gadbury, Ephemeris (London, 1684), sig. a7r.
75
See, for example, John Dade, A New Almanacke and Prognostication (London,
1608, STC 434.20), sig. b3r.
76
William Andrews, Coelestes Observationes (London, 1670), sig. c7v.
77
The London Almanack (London, 1673), sig. c5r.
104 PAST AND PRESENT

influential Flores, written by the ninth-century Baghdad astrol-

oger Abû Ma’shar and read widely amongst astrologers in early
modern Europe, explained that revolution horoscopes enabled
specific predictions regarding the achievements, temperaments
and business affairs of the rich (dives) as well as the vulgar (vul-
gus). Yet, large-scale, collective events –– such as famine, war,
pestilence, earthquakes and floods –– tended to impact all per-

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sons (homo) resident in a city.78 In other words, events like dis-
eases could cut across the boundary between dives and vulgus.
Hence while Saturn generally indicated things likely to happen to
the rich, for Abû Ma’shar the diseases ruled by Saturn impacted
bodies in general.79 The celebrated thirteenth-century Speculum
astronomiae similarly explained that the revolution horoscope
indicated what God would produce amongst the rich men of
a particular region but also, when it came to corporate events,
what would happen to the whole of the common populace in
that area (super divites quorundam climatum et in universitatem
vulgi eorum).80 In his influential Liber astronomiae, the Italian
astrologer Guido Bonatti likewise outlined how revolution horo-
scopes enabled astrologers to make predictions about the state
of the populace (populus) or, more specifically, the inhabitants
(habitator) of a region (regio). Such predictions allowed one to
know in advance the accidents that were going to come to the
region in which one was located (in regione in qua fueris).81
These theories fed into the practice of general astrology in the
early modern period. Many disease predictions were assumed
to be liable to impact people simply by virtue of them being
resident — or simply present for a time — in the region in ques-
tion. The physical location could be more important than the
social standing of any individual or subgroup not only because
of the geographical assumptions implicit in astronomical tables
but also because within astrology, different cities, regions and
nations carried their own associations with particular parts
of the heavens. As Ptolemy had explained in Tetrabiblos, the

78
Albumasar, Flores astrologiae (Venice, c.1500), sigs. a2v, c2v–c3v.
79
Ibid., sig. b4r.
80
[Anon.], ‘Speculum astronomiae’, in Paola Zambelli (ed.), The Speculum
Astronomiae and its Enigma: Astrology, Theology and Science in Albertus Magnus and
His Contemporaries (Dordrecht, 1992), 228–9.
81
Guido Bonatti, De astronomia tractatus X (Basel, 1550), 489, 501.
 PLAGUE AND PROGNOSTICATION 105
four quarters of the earth were each governed by one of the
Triplicities, which gave each region certain traits. Furthermore,
nations and cities were linked with a sign (London with Gemini,
for instance), and each city could have a nativity horoscope cast
for the moment of its foundation. Conclusions about the con-
sequences of an eclipse, for example, could therefore be drawn
not only by considering the city for which a horoscope of the

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eclipse was cast, but also by paying attention to the location of
the eclipse itself on the horoscope: the planets, signs and houses
it interacted with, and the cities or regions associated with those
celestial signifiers.82
These principles enabled predictions for specific regions and
all the people that dwelled in them. As the famous Italian mathe-
matician and astrologer Girolamo Cardano (1501–76) explained
in a commonly cited aphorism, eclipses act on cities, provinces
and kingdoms more powerfully than they do on persons of pri-
vate conditions, or even on kings, because their effects are in
respect to the ‘multitude’.83 Like many other English astrolo-
gers, Gadbury followed Cardano when he came to predict the
likely outcomes of several eclipses set to take place in the year
1656. Noting that one of the eclipses had Saturn (in Aquarius)
as its Lord, he predicted it would bring about ‘strange corrup-
tions in Mans Body; tedious cold and dry Diseases, Coughs,
Consumptions, Fluxes, Rhumes, Palsies, Tremblings, Quartan
Agues, Leprosie, [and] all manner of melancholy diseases, either
of body or mind’. Importantly, these diseases could impact any-
one and everyone in London. Reading the horoscope more
closely, however, Gadbury noted the significance of the position
of Saturn in relation to Virgo, and because Virgo was the ascen-
dant of Paris, he concluded that the worst of these effects would
actually take place in ‘the Theatre of France’.84 Elsewhere, when
prognosticating plague, Gadbury acknowledged that the fate

82
Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, iii, 2–7.
83
Hieronymi Cardani mediolanensis, philosophi ac medici celeberrimi, opera omnia
(Lugduni, 1663), vol. 5, 61: ‘Eclipses luminarium super civitates, provincias, &
regna, magis quam super privatae conditionis homines, aut etiam super reges,
respiciunt enim multitudinem’.
84
John Gadbury, Speculum Astrologicum, or, An Astrological Glasse (London, 1656),
sigs. c8r–v.
106 PAST AND PRESENT

of one city could be different to that of another, and hence by

changing residence one could alter their fortune.85
What this suggests is that in practising general astrology, astrol-
ogers were relying on a quite sophisticated if largely implicit
notion of population that had a homogenous group of residents
as its object. Philip Kreager has argued that pre-modern con-
cepts of population were embedded in classical and humanist

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ideals of society as made up of ‘diverse but linked memberships’.
Here, certain subgroups, such as elite families, were superior
to other groups, some of whom (for example, non-citizens or
women), were excluded from the body politic.86 Practically
speaking, medieval (and, indeed, classical) approaches to cities
had long had to think in terms of the multitude; Peter Biller has
shown the extent to which medieval thinkers were preoccupied
with questions of populousness — including the best or most
efficient size of a polity and the relative ratios of its estates —
which in many cases involved some levelling of the people of
a city.87 Arguably, pre-modern initiatives for the health of the
people also relied on an idea of population that encompassed all
of the residents of a city, regardless of their estate. Guy Geltner
has noted for medieval urban health that ‘any action designed
to identify and resist behaviours thought to put a community
at risk requires defining that community’,88 and while this was
largely implicit, those who were expected to contribute to and
benefit from these measures suggest the working idea of popula-
tion here was residential, and included citizens and local inhab-
itants as well as foreigners and temporary visitors. In all this,
however, there still remained ‘a logic of inequality and natural
hierarchy’.89
85
Gadbury, London’s Deliverance, sig. a4r.
86
Philip Kreager, ‘The Emergence of Population’, in Nick Hopwood, Lauren
Kassell and Rebecca Fleming (eds.), Reproduction: From Antiquity to the Present
Day (Cambridge, 2018); Philip Kreager, ‘Population and the Making of the
Human Sciences: A Historical Outline’, in Philip Kreager et al. (eds.), Population
in the Human Sciences: Concepts, Models, Evidence (Oxford, 2015); Philip Kreager,
‘Population Theory — A Long View’, Population Studies, lxix, suppl. 1 (2015).
87
Peter Biller, The Measure of Multitude: Population in Medieval Thought (Oxford,
2000). See also Peter Biller, ‘The Multitude in Later Medieval Thought’, in
Hopwood, Kassell and Fleming (eds.), Reproduction.
88
Geltner, Roads to Health, 22.
89
Coomans, Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low
Countries, 256.
 PLAGUE AND PROGNOSTICATION 107
Kreager and others have shown that this began to change
in the seventeenth century with the work of John Graunt and
William Petty, who relied on quantitative analysis of demo-
graphic records to measure and track populations. Mortality
records had been kept in London since at least the sixteenth
century and were made publicly available in the weekly Bills
of Mortality, printed on a regular basis from the early seven-

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teenth century. The Bills tabulated the information collected by
‘Ancient Woemen’ who were engaged by their local parish to
visit the bodies of the newly deceased to determine the cause of
death.90 Many locals subscribed for personal copies of the Bills,
which were at first used to trace the movement of pestilence
throughout the city.91 In 1662, however, the haberdasher John
Graunt published Natural and Political Observations … Upon the
Bills of Mortality, a ground-breaking study comprising numer-
ical analyses of several decades of Bills, producing insightful
conclusions about birth and death rates, the sex ratio, and the
relative burden of infectious versus chronic disease at the popu-
lation level.92 In the closing decades of the seventeenth century,
Petty, close collaborator of Graunt, also applied quantitative
methods to human society, pioneering a political arithmetic that
among other things analysed mortality bills, searching for pat-
terns.93 As Kreager has argued, all this marked the beginning of
modern population thinking, which standardizes large collec-
tions of individuals and takes aggregate groups as its object. ‘A
population’, Kreager writes, ‘increasingly became any enumer-
ated resident aggregate, regardless of how it was formed and
sustained’.94

90
Stephen Greenberg, ‘Plague, the Printing Press, and Public Health in
Seventeenth-Century London’, Huntington Library Quarterly, lxvii, 4 (2004);
Richelle Munkhoff, ‘Searchers of the Dead: Authority, Marginality, and the
Interpretation of Plague in England, 1574–1665’, Gender and History, xi (1999).
91
J. C. Robertson, ‘Reckoning with London: Interpreting the Bills of Mortality
before John Graunt’, Urban History, xxiii (1996).
92
Philip Kreager, ‘Death and Method: The Rhetorical Space of Seventeenth-
Century Vital Measurement’, in Eileen Magnello and Anne Hardy (eds.), The
Road to Medical Statistics (Amsterdam, 2002); Margaret Pelling, ‘Far Too Many
Women? John Graunt, the Sex Ratio, and the Cultural Determination of Number in
Seventeenth-Century England’, Historical Journal, lix (2016).
93
See now Ted McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic
(Oxford, 2009).
94
Kreager, ‘Population Theory’, S32.
108 PAST AND PRESENT

The assumptions of astrologers are of course a far cry from

the efforts of modern specialists to standardize populations.
But in light of Kreager’s claims, it is significant that pre-mod-
ern astrologers not only regularly moved beyond the level of
the individual to consider population-level health, but were also
comfortable with conceiving of cities as being composed of var-
ious subpopulations as well as, ultimately, a group of residents

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with mortal bodies. Astrologers using general astrology had long
been working with an implicit notion of the collective residential
body of a city that approached more modern ideas of popula-
tion. From the examples given above, it is clear that astrolo-
gers continued to see the body politic as composed of different
estates or classes. Yet the disease predictions of general astrol-
ogy could also assume a certain equivalence amongst individual
members of the larger group. Like earthquakes, floods and other
large-scale events, epidemic and endemic disease were seen to
be experienced corporately and across the board. As the astrol-
oger William Ramesey explained, ‘the Grandees of the Earth,
although never so great and proud, yet they must know (with us)
they are but men, and such too, as are not excused from the har-
monious configurations of the Celestial Planets and Heavens’.95
In this sense, astrologers’ notions of population were located
midway between older notions of the social body and modern
ideas of aggregate populations as they began to emerge in the
later seventeenth century.
Considering astrologers’ sophisticated approaches to popula-
tion and to populations, it is no coincidence that early propo-
nents of political arithmetic were themselves interested in the
part that astrology could play in population-level health. In the
1640s and 1650s, many leading physicians and natural philoso-
phers in England displayed serious astrological ambitions, seeing
astrology as a fruitful tool for the study of disease at the popu-
lation level. In 1648, Petty himself envisaged the founding of a
college that would include an expert in astrology to ‘calculate
the Events of diseases’. The scholar would keep careful records
of ‘epidemicall diseases befalling man’, comparing them with
‘the Aspects of the Celestiall bodies’.96 As a university-trained
95
William Ramesey, Astrologia Restaurata (London, 1653), 219.
96
William Petty, The Advice of W. P. to Mr. Samuel Hartlib (1648), 12. For Ted
McCormick, Petty’s astrologer was essentially ‘a proto-statistician’: William Petty
and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic, 71.
 PLAGUE AND PROGNOSTICATION 109
physician, Petty would have been familiar with the basics of
astrology, including medical astrology, and clearly saw astrolo-
gy’s potential for understanding health at the population level.
In a paper presented to the Royal Society in 1674, Petty men-
tioned his desire to ‘build a Doctrine concerning the Influence
of the Stars, and other Celestial or remote Bodies upon the
Globe of the Earth, and its Inhabitants’. In a manuscript dating

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from the 1680s, Petty suggested again that studying the heav-
ens could help ‘compute the effects of plague’ in parishes.97
While Petty’s astrological interests did not make it into his most
famous writings on political arithmetic, he clearly continued to
probe the possibilities of astrological analysis within popula-
tion-level health. By the same token, it is no surprise that in the
second half of the seventeenth century astrologers themselves
were interested in developments in political arithmetic, learning
from its methods and making advances of their own in the study
of epidemics. We will see this in action in what follows.

III
Alongside their ability to standardize large groups of people,
astrologers’ interests in health at the population level and their
long-standing attempts to correlate earthly events with astro-
logical phenomena made astrology an obvious foundation for
the study of epidemics. Celestial causes had played a role in
most accounts of plague since the first outbreaks in Europe.98
Famously, when professors in the medical faculty at the
University of Paris were asked by Phillip VI to account for the
causes of the Black Death, they pointed inter alia to a recent
conjunction of Saturn, Mars, and Jupiter.99 The heavens were,

97
William Petty, The Discourse Made before the Royal Society (London, 1674),
76; Ted McCormick, ‘Governing Model Populations: Queries, Quantification, and
William Petty’s “Scale of Salubrity”’, History of Science, li (2013), 189.
98
Jon Arrizabalaga, ‘Facing the Black Death: Perceptions and Reactions of
University Medical Practitioners’, in Luis Garcia-Ballester et al. (eds.), Practical
Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death (Cambridge, 1994), 247; Samuel K. Cohn
Jr, Cultures of Plague: Medical Thinking at the End of the Renaissance (Oxford, 2010),
77–8, 194, cf. 195–7.
99
Anna Montgomery Campbell, The Black Death and Men of Learning (New York,
1931), 37, 39–40, 158.
110 PAST AND PRESENT

after all, a key facet of medieval and early modern theories of

causation. It must be remembered that for most astrologers,
the heavens were not just prophetic signs of what was to come
— they were causes. Leading medieval thinkers espoused what
Darrel Rutkin has called an ‘astrologizing Aristotelian natural
philosophy’, according to which God providentially governed
events on earth by using the motions and virtues of the celestial

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bodies.100 The heavens stimulated plague particularly through
the corruption of the air, which in turn corrupted the body.101
Indeed, the modern word ‘influenza’ likely derives from the idea
that the stars influenced the body. Astrological explanations of
plague, embedded as they were in the reigning miasma theory
of disease, retained considerable cultural capital throughout the
early modern period, enabling astrologers to build thriving busi-
nesses treating plague.102 But as well as treating and predicting
plague, astrologers also conducted analyses of epidemics that
resembled the epidemiological project to identify determinants
of disease at the population level.
Astrologers’ disease forecasts were based on theories about
the astrological origins of epidemics that were in turn sup-
ported by the comparative investigations undertaken by astrol-
ogers. As with other astrological theories, much of the empirical
data used to support plague predictions was historical.103 The
central text of conjunctionist theory, Abū Ma‘shar’s De mag-
nis coniunctionibus, which remained influential into the early
modern period, included a world history linking conjunctions

100
Rutkin, Sapientia Astrologica, esp. pts I and II.
101
Dorothea Waley Singer, ‘Some Plague Tractates (Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Centuries)’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, ix (1916); Geoffrey de Meaux,
‘The Astrological Causes of the Plague’, in Rosemary Horrox (ed. and trans.),
The Black Death (Manchester, 1994); Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and
Experimental Science, 9 vols. (New York, 1934), iii, 244–5, 284–91.
102
Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London, ch. 5. On pre-modern
debates about the causes of disease, see Vivian Nutton, ‘The Seeds of Disease:
An Explanation of Contagion and Infection from the Greeks to the Renaissance’,
Medical History, xxvii (1983).
103
On astrology and historical evidence, see J. D. North, ‘Astrology and the
Fortunes of Churches’, Centaurus, xxiv (1980); Laura Ackerman Smoller, History,
Prophecy, and the Stars:The Christian Astrology of Pierre d’Ailly, 1350–1420 (Princeton,
1994); Germana Ernst, ‘From the Watery Trigon to the Fiery Trigon: Celestial
Signs, Prophecies and History’, in Paola Zambelli (ed.), ‘Astrologi Hallucinati’: Stars
and the End of the World in Luther’s Time (Berlin, 1986).
 PLAGUE AND PROGNOSTICATION 111
to major historical events. There was also a long-standing tra-
dition amongst astrologers of keeping detailed weather obser-
vations and comparing them with the positions of the celestial
bodies.104 As we have seen, this correlative and historical work
was done on a more minute scale by the consumers of alma-
nacs, who in keeping a journal in their almanac highlighted
significant events that seemingly aligned with astrological con-

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ditions. Believing that a full understanding of world history
would sharpen predictions about the future, early modern
astrologers continued to explain the past in view of celestial
events, using the patterns they noticed to direct their forecasts.
In a sweeping prognostication for the years 1595–1655, the
German astrologer David Origanus claimed that in order to
know the coming of pestilence from the stars, it was necessary
to consult the evidence of history and experience (ex historiis
et experientia). His study found that plague struck Frankfurt
approximately every ten years, ‘primo, Christi 1506, Saturno
existente in ; in 1516 in ; in 1526 in ’ (‘first, [in the year]
of Christ 1506, with Saturn appearing in Leo; in 1516 in
Sagittarius; in 1526 in Aries’). As Origanus noted, these were
the three signs of the Fiery Triplicity. While in some other
plague years Saturn appeared in different triplicities, Origanus
cited the German astronomer Caspar Peucer, who had sim-
ilarly noticed that plague typically struck Wittenberg when
Saturn was in Leo or Aquarius.105
Across the channel, astrologers and scholars with astrologi-
cal interests constructed rules about the occurrence of plague
based on similar historical evidence. The antiquarian William
Camden (1551–1623) was often cited as having shown via the
evidence of history that whenever Saturn was in Capricorn,
London would be hit by plague.106 Simon Forman similarly
104
See most recently Sky Michael Johnston, ‘Printing the Weather: Knowledge,
Nature, and Popular Culture in Two Sixteenth-Century German Weather Books’,
Renaissance Quarterly, lxxiii (2020).
105
David Origanus, Novae motuum coelestium ephemerides Brandenburgicae
(Frankfurt an der Oder, 1609), 518.
106
For example, John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Richard Barber (Woodbridge,
1998), 60. Others quoted Camden as instead pointing to Saturn’s passage through
the Fiery Triplicity: George Wharton, Ephemeris (London, 1655), 15; Edlyn,
Prae-Nuncius Sydereus, 42. Camden’s published claims were not as explicit as either
version. See William Camden, Britannia (London, 1616, STC 23044), 207–8;
Thomas Hearne (ed.), Guilielmi Camdeni Annales Regum Anglicarum et Hibernicarum
Regnante Elizabetha, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1717), iii, 666.
112 PAST AND PRESENT

declared that Saturn in Cancer indicated the coming of a great

London plague.107 In one of his almanacs, George Wharton
attempted to use historical evidence to show that Saturn’s pres-
ence in fiery signs caused London plagues, claiming that Saturn
was in Aries for the Black Death, Leo for the plague of 1593,
Sagittarius for the 1603 plague, and Leo for the 1625 plague.
Extrapolating from this pattern, Wharton fortuitously predicted

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the Great Plague of London several years before Edlyn.108 As we
have seen, Edlyn’s prediction was premised on a conjunction
that took place in a sign of the Fiery Triplicity. His idea that
conjunctions triggered plagues was partly founded upon the
patterns he discovered between historical episodes of pestilence
and the heavens. Reflecting on London plagues of the preceding
century, Edlyn noted that the ‘most furious’ of them all followed
conjunctions. Edlyn’s assumption was that reliable theories and
thus dependable predictions could be established ‘by comparing
the Histories of former times’ with celestial events.109
From the 1660s onwards, astrologers added an additional
layer of numerical evidence to this project in the form of mor-
tality figures. This was a period in which Baconian empiri-
cism, alongside a heightened acknowledgement of the value of
numbers in natural philosophy and medicine, was becoming
institutionalized in the Royal Society of London. Interest in
the practical application of mixed mathematics in particular
reached a high point in the middle decades of the seventeenth
century.110 At the same time, astrologers across Europe were
engaged in attempts to reform astrology; in England, most
astrological reformers saw themselves as Baconians who fol-
lowed in the footsteps of the great philosopher.111 Bacon him-
self had described a programme for the reform of astrology
that involved ‘a collection from the faithfull reports of History’
of major events including ‘Pestilences’ and the contemplation

107
Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Ashmole 384, fo. 8r.
108
Wharton, Ephemeris, 14–16.
109
Edlyn, Prae-Nuncius Sydereus, 42, 1, 7.
110
Jim Bennett and Rebekah Higgitt (eds.), ‘London 1600–1800: Communities
of Natural Knowledge and Artificial Practice’, special issue of British Journal for the
History of Science, lii (2019).
111
See, especially, Mary Ellen Bowden, ‘The Scientific Revolution in Astrology:
The English Reformers, 1558–1686’ (Yale Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1974); Curry,
Prophecy and Power.
 PLAGUE AND PROGNOSTICATION 113
of ‘the situation of the Heavens … at those times, when such
effects came to passe’. Bacon postulated that if there appeared
‘a cleere, and evident consent, and concurrence of events; there
a probable rule of Prediction may be inferred’.112 As we have
seen, the 1660s was also a decade that saw the development of
innovative approaches to political arithmetic, and these paral-
lel developments in mixed mathematics also proved useful to

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astrologers. In particular, Graunt’s book on the Mortality Bills
was immensely popular: it went into five editions by 1676 and
was frequently plagiarized.113 It was in the context of the sen-
sation produced by this book — which encouraged readers to
‘do more’ with the information contained in the Bills — along-
side growing interest in the applications of mathematics, that
astrologers began to conduct innovative quantitative studies of
epidemics.
Gadbury’s London’s Deliverance Predicted (1665) is a rich
example of this. Written in the midst of the Great Plague, the
book was a study of correlations between the configurations of
the heavens and the rise and fall of plague deaths in recent epi-
demics.114 After becoming interested in astrology while reading
Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy in bed, Gadbury (whose
almanacs we have already met) rose to prominence in the 1650s
and 1660s with his successful prognostications and numerous
mathematical books.115 Claiming that ‘it is not the Predictive
but Experimental part of Astrology, that is my Diana’, Gadbury
engaged with the burgeoning mathematical culture of London,
like many of his colleagues undertaking projects aimed at
reforming astrology.116 By this point, most aspects of astrologi-
cal theory had been removed from undergraduate curricula at
Oxford and Cambridge, and Gadbury was acutely aware that

112
Francis Bacon, Of the Advancement and Proficiencie of Learning, or, The Partitions
of Sciences, IX Bookes (London, 1640), 154–5.
113
Kreager, ‘Death and Method’, 15.
114
D. R. Bellhouse briefly recognized the significance of Gadbury’s contribution
in 1998, but Gadbury’s study is yet to receive detailed analysis. See D. R. Bellhouse,
‘London Plague Statistics in 1665’, Journal of Official Statistics, xiv (1998), 224–5.
115
John Gadbury, Cardines Coeli (London, 1684), 59.
116
John Gadbury, Ephemeris (London, 1679), sig. a1v.
114 PAST AND PRESENT

many scholars had ‘but an indifferent opinion of Astrology’,

with many ‘Damning and Reprobating it’.117 In his study of
astrology and plague, which aimed to improve astrology’s per-
ceived legitimacy as well as provide ‘encouragement’ to the peo-
ple of London, Gadbury found value in recent advances in the
analysis of mortality records.118
His book’s central task was to determine ‘the probable time …

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this present Pest may abate’. Extolling the ability of astrology to
provide an answer to this pressing question, Gadbury asserted
that physicians were unable to explain when epidemics would
arrive let alone how long they would last or how many lives they
would claim.119 As many astrologers before him had asserted,
because the causes of plague were to be found in the heavens,
astrologers were best placed to forecast its course. Gadbury’s
initial supposition was a mainstay of astrological lore: pestilen-
tial diseases arise from Mars and Saturn. Mars was dry, hot and
Cholerick (and therefore the source of pestilence), and Saturn
was earthy, cold and dry (and therefore the author of all ‘tedious
and durable infirmities’). ‘Co-operating Causes’ included com-
ets and eclipses. Gadbury found a ‘demonstration’ for these the-
ories in history. For example, the sweating sickness epidemic of
1527 was accompanied by a comet and a conjunction in Pisces,
a watery sign that accounted for the sweat. The plagues of 1593,
1603, 1625 and 1636 told similar stories.120 Thus far Gadbury’s
study was unoriginal, and he cited Origanus, Peucer and others
as his sources. However, Gadbury then sought to go beyond
these studies by drawing on quantitative records to support and
expand on his contentions.

117
Gadbury, London’s Deliverance, sig. a2r. The removal of astrology from English
universities has been neglected by historians. Officially, ‘all judicial astrology’ was
banned from the astronomy curriculum by the Oxford Savilian statutes of 1619,
but this did not include medicine and natural philosophy courses. Throughout
much of the seventeenth century, unofficial astrology teaching continued at Oxford
and Cambridge. G. R. M. Ward (ed. and trans.), Oxford University Statutes, 2 vols.
(London, 1845), i, 274; Phyllis Allen, ‘Scientific Studies in the English Universities
of the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas, x (1949), 226; Thomas,
Religion and the Decline of Magic, 354; Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press, 187.
118
Gadbury, London’s Deliverance, sig. a4v.
119
Ibid., sig. a2r.
120
Ibid., 2, 4–8.
 PLAGUE AND PROGNOSTICATION 115
Gadbury knew that Saturn and Mars were involved in the onset
of plague, and that conjunctions and other angles (‘aspects’)
between the superior planets also played a role. But what precise
celestial configurations should one search for when prognosti-
cating the course of plague? To answer this question, Gadbury
turned to mortality records. In Chapter 3 of his book, Gadbury
included ‘A Table shewing the Increase and Abatement of the

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Plague in the years 1593, 1603, 1625, 1636’ (see Plate 3). It
charted the number of reported plague deaths each week for
these major epidemics.121 Bringing together this set of quan-
titative records with another — astronomical calculations —
Gadbury parsed his table, comparing the incidence of plague
deaths with the respective positions of the heavens. The correla-
tions he found most important were not comets or eclipses, but
the aspects between the planets. Conjunction (0°), sextile (60°),
square (90°), trine (120°), and opposition (180°) were each
traditionally thought to modulate the planets’ effects. Gadbury
knew that, in general, opposition and square were unfortu-
nate; sextile and trine were fortunate; and while a conjunction
between two good planets boded well, a conjunction between
two bad planets did not.122 These theories underlay Gadbury’s
analysis. Referring his readers to the table, Gadbury noted that
in 1593, plague deaths were low until June, when Saturn was in
opposition with the ascendant. Deaths then worsened in July,
when Mars was square with the moon, and the sun was in oppo-
sition with Mars and Jupiter, and in conjunction with Saturn.
Plague grew ‘less tyrannous’ in September, when Venus was trine
with the sun and moon. In October, November and December,
plague ‘vanished by degrees to almost nothing’, when Venus and
Jupiter’s positions were more beneficial. Gadbury found similar
patterns for 1603, 1625 and 1636. Gadbury’s analysis boiled
down to this: when two maleficent planets were in bad aspects,
plague increased; when two ‘friendly’ planets were in favour-
able aspects, plague decreased. Mars tended to initiate plague;

121
Comparison of Gadbury’s data with extant mortality records suggests he
cribbed his figures from an anonymous pamphlet, The Four Great Years of the Plague
(1665).
122
John Gadbury, Thesaurus astrologiae, or, An Astrological Treasury (London,
1674), 158–63.
116 PAST AND PRESENT
Saturn sustained it. Venus and Jupiter, meanwhile, were respon-
sible overall for ‘lessen[ing] the fury’ of pestilence.123 All of this
is, of course, a confusion between correlation and causation. Yet
the analysis nevertheless gave Gadbury patterns to search for in
the year 1665.
Gadbury next applied his findings to the present plague. He
noted that the outbreak was likely triggered by the Saturn–

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Jupiter conjunction identified by Edlyn alongside the 1664 com-
ets. These circumstances meant the outbreak actually should
have begun in late 1664, but the ‘extreamly sharp’ winter held
it back, with only a few cases reported in December (including
Gadbury’s own infection).124 Gadbury noted that, according to
the Bills published thus far, plague deaths only increased signifi-
cantly in June and July 1665. Writing in early August, Gadbury
then used the revolution horoscope to predict plague’s inci-
dence for the rest of the year. In August, Saturn would be square
with the sun, and this aspect would bring about much mortality,
though the positions of Venus and Jupiter may ‘contemper the
fury of it’. September was ‘likely to prove somewhat dangerous’,
especially in the middle of the month, as a result of the positions
of Saturn and Mars. October seemed to ‘promise well’, except
for the second and last week, which would be far worse. Finally,
astrological conditions meant that November and December
would ‘prove very kindly’.125 Comparing surviving Bills with
Gadbury’s predictions suggests that while he was correct in
predicting a peak in plague deaths in September followed by
a steep decrease later in the year (which, it may be noted, was
a common pattern), his prediction about a decrease in August
did not come to pass. The accuracy or otherwise of Gadbury’s
predictions aside, the difficulty that he and others faced in try-
ing to demonstrate astrological causation experimentally lay not
only in the great complexity of the movements of the heavenly
bodies, but also in the fact that the same configurations of the
heavens reoccur only extremely rarely.
The significance of Gadbury’s study lies not only in its inno-
vative combination of two sets of quantitative evidence, astro-
nomical figures alongside mortality records. It also lies in his

123
Gadbury, London’s Deliverance, 15–17.
124
Ibid., 2.
125
Ibid., 20–1.
 PLAGUE AND PROGNOSTICATION 117

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3. Gadbury’s table. Source: The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Bod.
Ashm. 311(5): John Gadbury, London’s Deliverance Predicted (1655), 13–14.

attempt to find correlations with minute fluctuations in mor-

tality rates, and his subsequent use of this analysis to ‘model’
the rise and fall of an epidemic. Located at the nexus between
mathematics and medicine, astrology was initially a promising
pathway for the study of epidemic disease. Earlier in the seven-
teenth century, Forman had devised astrological rules for pre-
dicting ‘howe manie shall die of the plague in one week then
in another’, but this did not involve extended analysis of the
Bills.126 But twenty years after London’s Deliverance Predicted, the
astrologer John Goad also used the Bills of Mortality to study
the incidence of mental as well as bodily illness.127 After noticing
that multiple individuals died from lunacy in February 1682,
Goad wondered what the cause might have been, and began to

126
Bodleian Lib., MS Ashmole 384, fo. 8r.
127
Goad had been thinking about the Bills in terms of the stars since at least 1679,
when he wrote to Elias Ashmole to discuss the causes behind the increase in deaths
by cough: Bodleian Lib., MS Ashmole 368, fo. 62r.
118 PAST AND PRESENT

investigate possible ‘Co-incidences’ between the figures in the

Bills and the positions of the heavens. ‘God hath given us leave
… to consider what Second Causes he is pleased to use in the
powring out of his Fury on us’, he explained.128 Goad ended
up comparing suicide rates, as recorded in the Bills, with the
aspects of Saturn and Jupiter.129 He did the same thing with
various epidemics — plague, but also the sweating sickness —

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relying on exact mortality figures whenever he had access to
them.130 When it came to the 1665 plague, Goad engaged in a
similar analysis to Gadbury’s. Numbers were important to con-
sider because, as Goad explained, there are crucial differences
between a plague that kills ten thousand in a year to one that
kills fifty thousand or even a hundred thousand.131
It is worth briefly comparing these efforts with other contem-
porary attempts to correlate the wax and wane of plague with
external factors. In the 1620s and 1630s, the Londoner John
Flower offered a simple comparative analysis when he noted
some parallels between the rise and fall of plague deaths and
changes in the weather.132 More sophisticated were John Locke’s
attempts from the mid 1660s to connect the incidence of plague
with climatic data, but even this study was limited in its use
of numbers and was ultimately left unfinished.133 In a very dif-
ferent display of comparative analysis, John Bell of the Parish
Clerks Company accounted for differences in plague mortality
by drawing on the patterns he discovered in the Old Testament.
Bell found that plagues initiated by the peoples’ sins killed men
and women, while those triggered by sinful kings killed only
men. As London plagues killed everyone, they were therefore
caused by sins of the people, most likely rebellion.134 None of
these studies were as extensive as Gadbury’s, or even Goad’s,

128
John Goad, Astro-Meterologica, or Aphorisms and Discourses of the Bodies Coelestial
(London, 1686), 252.
129
Ibid., 506–7.
130
For example, ibid., 252–4, 286–88, 473–89. Goad did not have access to all the
Bills and lamented the periods for which he lacked ‘the Weekly account’. See ibid., 433.
131
Ibid., 433–4, 387.
132
Robertson, ‘Reckoning with London’, 341–3.
133
Kenneth Dewhurst, ‘A Review of John Locke’s Research in Social and
Preventative Medicine’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, xxxvi (1962).
134
John Bell, London’s Remembrancer (London, 1665), sigs. d2v–d3v.
 PLAGUE AND PROGNOSTICATION 119
and none, including Graunt’s, produced fine-grained predic-
tions as a result.
It has been argued that Graunt’s mercantile background,
which gave him experience in contemporary accounting prac-
tices and helped him to see the Bills as ripe with valuable data
for studying client patterns, paved the way for his innovative
Observations.135 Astrologers, with their expertise in both medi-

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cine and mathematics, were similarly well placed to make novel
studies of epidemics. However, written in a period in which
the educated elite were increasingly dissatisfied with astro-
logical prediction, Gadbury’s London’s Deliverance was soon
forgotten. It initially received a great deal of positive press,
with long portions of it reprinted in other works.136 But the
limited evidence we possess of the book’s reception amongst
the Royal Society suggests that Gadbury’s attempts to revive
astrology’s reputation amongst the learned were too little too
late. In a memorandum dated 26 September 1665, Henry
Oldenburg directed Robert Boyle to London’s Deliverance to
see how plague ‘decreased and increased again’. Oldenburg
acknowledged that the volume contained ‘some natural obser-
vations that make his pamphlet worth the money’. However,
Gadbury’s overreliance on theories of planetary aspects, which
Oldenburg ridiculed as ‘squinting and staring looks’, weakened
his forecast.137 In other words, in Oldenburg’s eyes Gadbury’s
dependence on disputed astrological theories undermined the
value of his study.
Yet the underlying methods of Gadbury’s enterprising use of
mortality bills remained of interest to experimental natural phi-
losophers. In the 1680s and 1690s, the Royal Society became
interested in the work of the German Protestant minister Caspar
Neumann, who embarked on a similar project to Gadbury’s,
except that it ended up challenging the very concept of celestial

135
Merchants used the Bills to determine the risk of clients fleeing town. Judy
L. Klein, Statistical Visions in Time: A History of Time Series Analysis, 1662–1938
(Cambridge, 1997), 25–7, 46–7.
136
Prophecies, and Predictions; Prophecie of one of His Maiesties Chaplains. Gadbury
complained it was much plagiarized. See John Gadbury, Ephemeris (London, 1666),
sig. a1v. Many took aim at Gadbury’s controversial claims about the best way to
manage plague. See John Gadbury, Vox solis (London, 1667), 24–7.
137
A. R. Hall and M. B. Hall (eds. and trans.), The Correspondence of Henry
Oldenburg, 10 vols. (Madison, 1965), ii, 523.
120 PAST AND PRESENT

influence on disease. Studying the registers of births and deaths

in his local Breslau, Neumann searched for patterns, finding
that the movements of the moon had no influence on mortal-
ity rates, and that other related astrological theories (for exam-
ple, climacteric years) were likewise unfounded.138 Neumann’s
study — which also sat at the nexus of medicine and mathemat-
ics — was much lauded by the Royal Society, and paved the way

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for the production of the first life tables by Edmond Halley in
the early 1690s, an innovation of great moment in the history of
demography, public health and life insurance.139 The same tech-
niques that astrologers used to finesse their prognostications
could thus end up being used to contest the very possibility of
astrological prediction.
Although Gadbury recognized in Graunt’s cutting-edge meth-
ods a way to reinforce the foundations of astrology, the approach
pioneered by Graunt soon overtook whatever potential astro-
logically based approaches to population health were thought
to offer.140 This is not to say, as was commonly claimed in the
twentieth century, that the science of the Royal Society defeated
astrology.141 In fact, many leading members of the Royal Society
remained interested in the reform of astrology; Oldenburg, for
his part, collected nativity horoscopes and Boyle, despite his
misgivings about astrological practice, remained fascinated by
the idea of celestial influence.142 The Royal Society rarely paid

138
Peter Koch, ‘Caspar Neumann’, in C. C. Heyde et al. (eds.), Statisticians of the
Centuries (New York, 2001), 30. Neumann’s treatise is now lost.
139
Hans Wiesler, ‘The Investigation of Mortality’, in Annals of Life Insurance
Medicine (Berlin, 1962), i, 8–9; D. R. Bellhouse, ‘A New Look at Halley’s Life Table’,
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society A, clxxiv (2011), 825.
140
On the uptake of statistics in medicine, see Andrea A. Rusnock, Vital Accounts:
Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France
(Cambridge, 2002); Eileen Magnello and Anne Hardy (eds.), The Road to Medical
Statistics (Amsterdam, 2002); Innes, Inferior Politics, esp. ch. 4.
141
Astrology’s fortunes in medicine in particular have received little attention, but
see George R. Keiser, ‘Two Medieval Plague Treatises and their Afterlife in Early
Modern England’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, lviii (2003);
Mark Harrison, ‘From Medical Astrology to Medical Astronomy: Sol-Lunar and
Planetary Theories of Disease in British Medicine, c.1700–1850’, British Journal for
the History of Science, xxxiii (2000).
142
Hall and Hall (eds. and trans.), Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ii, 281, 307–
8; Curry, Prophecy and Power, 62–4; Robert Boyle, ‘Suspicions about some Hidden
Qualities of the Air’, in Tracts (London, 1674).
 PLAGUE AND PROGNOSTICATION 121
official, corporate attention to astrology but as Michael Hunter
has argued this was in large part because its Fellows’ views were
so divided on the issue of astrology’s legitimacy.143 In these cir-
cumstances, it would be more accurate to say that astrological
approaches to population-level health were sidelined and mar-
ginalized or, in some cases, simply forgotten. It is possible that
if Gadbury had chosen to explore the impact of a different cor-

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relate — such as the coming and going of winter — his work
may have enjoyed more contemporary success, and perhaps
may even have been remembered in histories of epidemiology.
In this sense, as is so often the case in the history of science, the
Royal Society’s biases have become modern historians’ biases.

IV
The ability to foresee the outbreak of epidemic disease, and to
predict its course, is a highly coveted skill. Most often associ-
ated with statistical techniques such as mathematical mod-
elling, such efforts to improve the health of communities are
thought to be exclusively modern. The methods and assump-
tions of epidemiology, it is said, are categorically distinct from
pre-modern medicine, which was concerned with individual
patients rather than the impact of disease at a group level.144
Public health more generally is typically assumed to be a mod-
ern phenomenon, linked to the rise of the centralized state and
modern conceptions of ‘population’ and ‘the public’. Sixty years
ago, Fraser Brockington claimed in his classic history of public
health that the centuries between antiquity and the eighteenth
century were spent, ‘so far as concerns public health, in the wil-
derness’. Although Hippocrates made innovations in regards
to the environmental causes of disease, and although medie-
val sanitary regulations of plague, leprosy and venereal disease
were strides forward, no public health of note occurred during

143
Michael Hunter, ‘The Royal Society and the Decline of Magic’, Notes and
Records of the Royal Society of London, lxv (2011), 108, 110.
144
This has been argued forcibly by Alfredo Morabia in ‘Epidemiology: An
Epistemological Perspective’, in Alfredo Morabia (ed.), A History of Epidemiologic
Methods and Concepts (Basel, 2004), 5, 9–11; Alfredo Morabia, ‘Epidemiology’s
350th Anniversary: 1662–2012’, Epidemiology, xxiv (2013); and his review of Public
Health: The Development of a Discipline, in American Journal of Epidemiology, clxxvi
(2010), 564.
122 PAST AND PRESENT

‘those dark centuries’.145 A more recent volume, Public Health:

The Development of a Discipline (2008), explores the ‘classics’ of
public health, but offers no text or figure between Hippocrates
and Graunt, an astonishing gap of over two thousand years.146
These prominent narratives are not only teleological; they also
assume that pre-modern measures to improve the health of
communities are not worth the attention of the public health

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historian because they were apparently unregulated and inef-
fective (even exacerbating), or else religiously based or lacking a
modern notion of ‘population’.
An emerging literature is calling this view into question. By
illustrating myriad efforts at population-level health care long
before the nineteenth century, historians have challenged the
prominent view that any talk of pre-modern public health must
be an oxymoron or perilous anachronism.147 Rather than seek-
ing precursors to modern public health and epidemiology, this
work has aimed to understand earlier population-level strate-
gies on their own terms, and has advocated for broader defi-
nitions of public health that go beyond nineteenth-century
sanitation and modern epidemiology.148 It has been argued that
this should incorporate all endeavours to protect and promote
community health and welfare, religious as well as medical and
demographical.149
Does astrology also deserve a place in these histories? As we
have seen, much of astrologers’ activities related to population
health were not primarily intended to be politically operational,
nor were almanac compilers state actors. Yet many of the activ-
ities that historians have identified as pre-modern public health

145
C. Fraser Brockington, A Short History of Public Health (London, 1956), 1.
146
Dona Schneider and David E. Lilienfeld (eds.), Public Health: The Development
of a Discipline (New Brunswick, 2008).
147
For programmatic statements about the direction of the subfield of pre-modern
public health, see Janna Coomans, ‘The King of Dirt: Public Health and Sanitation
in Late Medieval Ghent’, Urban History, xlvi (2019), esp. 83–8; Guy Geltner,
‘Healthscaping a Medieval City: Lucca’s Curia viarum and the Future of Public
Health History’, Urban History, xl (2013), esp. 396–8, 409–11.
148
Rawcliffe, Urban Bodies, 5; Dorothy Porter, ‘The History of Public Health:
Current Themes and Approaches’, Hygiea Internationalis, i (1999), 13.
149
Peregrine Horden, ‘Ritual and Public Health in the Early Medieval City’, in
Sally Sheard and Helen Power (eds.), Body and City: Histories of Urban Public Health
(London, 2017).
 PLAGUE AND PROGNOSTICATION 123
were initiated and shaped by a variety of non-government actors
‘from the social bottom up, as well as horizontally’; after all,
hierarchies of medical authority were perpetually in flux, espe-
cially in the early modern period, and the modern public/private
divide had not yet fully emerged.150 For early modern astrolo-
gers, the collective activity of the residents of cities was in any
case more effective than any top-down response. Moreover,

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although the envisioned outcomes of astrological prognostica-
tion were not always entirely secular — revealing God’s divine
‘oeconomy’ of the world was often as important as preparing
the city for impending diseases — neatly separating pre-modern
medicine from religion is a task doomed to fail. And although
Kreager maintains that ‘early modern population thinking did
not standardize populations, nor pretend to treat them equally’,
the case of astrology suggests that this assumption is in need of
rethinking.151 If public health is a field with the goal to ‘promote,
protect and restore the health of the population’,152 then it is
the contention of the present author that astrologers and their
attempts to forecast and monitor population-level health should
be considered as part of the history of this arena of human
activity.
The evidence presented in this article suggests that in the early
modern period, astrology took on many of the needs that modern
public health and epidemiology eventually came to serve, tak-
ing on many activities we associate with these disciplines today.
Astrological disease forecasts advised the residents of cities and
towns what ailments were likely to impact their community,
and what they should do about it. In using general astrology,
astrologers worked with sophisticated ideas about population.
Astrology was therefore ripe for the study and attempted pre-
diction of epidemic disease. By correlating past epidemics with
astrological events, astrologers sought to isolate critical fac-
tors in the spread of disease at the population level. Gadbury’s
London’s Deliverance added another layer to earlier astrological
investigations by buttressing his analysis with an additional set
of quantitative evidence. This article has focused on England,
but early modern astrologers’ interests in population-level

150
See, especially, Geltner, Roads to Health, 17–27.
151
Kreager, ‘Emergence of Population’, 253.
152
This is a definition used today by the WHO.
124 PAST AND PRESENT

health were by no means limited to the English context, and

further research will likely reveal this to have been a pan-Eu-
ropean phenomenon.153 Sitting at the intersection of medicine
and mathematics, astrology was once a promising methodology
for monitoring and managing the health of the people, even if
it was ultimately a path not taken. Yet this article is grounded
in the conviction that taking past conceptions of public health

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seriously requires us to consider the radically unrecognizable as
well as the recognizable. Our modern assumptions should not
justify sweeping aside an aspect of public health that was valued
in the pre-modern world.

Michelle Pfeffer
University of Oxford, UK

153
Studies of almanacs in various European contexts, while mostly focusing on
the political and religious aspects of these texts, have already provided evidence that
alongside discussion of agriculture, religion and war, their compilers also included
sections on population-level illness. See Justin Rivest, ‘Printing and Astrology in
Early Modern France: Vernacular Almanac-Prognostications, 1497–1555’ (Carleton
Univ. MA dissertation, 2004), 122–3; Jonathan Green, Printing and Prophecy:
Prognostication and Media Change, 1450–1550 (Ann Arbor, 2012), 114, 118, 120;
Martin Kjellgren, Taming the Prophets: Astrology, Orthodoxy and the Word of God in
Early Modern Sweden (Lund, 2011), 119; Tayra Lanuza-Navarro, ‘Astrological
Literature in Seventeenth-Century Spain’, Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies, vii
(2009), 121–4.