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Cardano's Cosmos : The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer
Cardano's Cosmos The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer Author:Anthony Grafton Winner of the 2000 Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize in Italian History given by the American Historical Association Girolamo Cardano was an Italian doctor, natural philosopher, and mathematician who became a best-selling author in Renaissance Europe. He was also a leading astrologer of his day. In Cardano's Cosmos, Anthony Grafton invite... more »s readers to follow this astrologer's extraordinary career and explore the art and discipline of astrology in the hands of a brilliant practitioner. Grafton also maps the context of market and human forces that shaped Cardano's practices—and the maneuvering that kept him at the top of a world rife with patronage, politics, and vengeful rivals. "Beyond a doubt, Grafton is now our leading guide to the history of humane letters and scholarship between the Renaissance and the rise of Romanticism. In the end, Cardano's cosmos is nothing less than a world of wonders … [Grafton] shows us that the sixteenth-century thinkers found in astrology much of what we now look for in psychology, political theory, moral philosophy and economics—'fundamental tools for analyzing and controlling' our societies." —Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World« less