Professor Hilary Carey

Duke Humfrey and the art and science of astrology

Abstract

Humfrey, duke of Gloucester (1390-1447), brother, son and uncle of kings, was one of the great patrons of the arts, books collectors and donors of his age. His contribution to the establishment of the Oxford University library is justly reflected in the name of manuscript repository which bears his name,(although almost none of his donations now reside there) and his activities as a patron of the Italian humanists, as well as English poets, artists, and other intellectuals has been the subject of extensive discussion by generations of scholars. This paper will consider Humfrey's role, and that of his wife Elinor Cobham, as patrons of the art of astrology as represented in surviving manuscripts.

Biography

I am a religious and cultural historian. My major research interests lie in the history of religion and imperialism particularly within the transnational boundaries of the nineteenth-century British empire. I am interested in big historical questions such as how religion serves to tie empires together (or tear them apart) and connections between church and state in an imperial context. I have also written at different times on the history of religious orders, missions and missionaries, missionary linguistics, the history of the colonial Bible and the settler histories of churches and colonial missions in the British World.

I trained initially as a medieval historian at the University of Oxford and I continue to retain an interest in the long history of astrology and its ideologies across the Latin, Greek and Arabic cultures of the medieval world. In this mode I have written on political horoscopes at the medieval court (for my first book, Courting Disaster), medical astrology and the book history of astrological almanacs.

I have two projects going to press. The first is a collaboratve history of religion and the Irish diaspora in the British world which will be published next year by McGill-Queens University Press (MQUP). The second is a history of Methodism in Australia with Dr Glen O'Brien of the Sydney College of Divinity. This will be published in 2015 by Ashgate in their Methodist Studies Series. I am also completing a history of religion and the campaign to end convict transportation in the British empire for Cambridge University Press.