Texts and Contexts of Medieval Astronomy and Astrology: Structures, Instructions, and Teaching Strategies

In scholarship on the transmission of knowledge across different cultures in the medieval period, historians--most notably George Makdisi--have identified evidence of pedagogical similarities and differences. However, very little attention has been afforded to pedagogies associated with particular disciplines such as astronomy and astrology, and even less to how astronomy and astrology were taught together. It is through these disciplinary building blocks that we may reconstruct the broader pedagogical trends in the circulation of knowledge before the printing press. In this panel, we will examine genres of texts associated with instruction—including introductions and canons to astronomical tables—in order to better understand how knowledge passed both across cultures and to subsequent generations of learners. We look specifically at the internal structures of texts, including organizational decisions, diagrams and tables, and the syntax of instructional language, to determine how texts were used as pedagogical tools. We also consider how different genres of texts were intended to be read together as part of an emerging curriculum of study, in order to better articulate the relationship between technical astronomy, mathematical astrology, and theoretical astrology in medieval Byzantine, Islamic, and European traditions.