Conference Theme

A Meeting of Minds:
Mentalities in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology

For historians the history of mentalities, describes and analyses the ways in which people think about, engage with and classify the world around them. The term was applied to the history of astrology by Ann Geneva in her 1995 book, Astrology and the Seventeenth Century Mind: William Lilly and the Language of the Stars.

This academic conference explores two issues in the history and culture of astrology and the construction of the human relationship with the sky and stars.

The first is the nature of astrological claims concerning the soul, or psyche. This may be seen in the nature of the relationship between the soul, mind and stars in ancient, Medieval or Renaissance astrology, and the astrologies of both east and west, as well as the development of psychological astrology in the 20th century

The second concerns the ways in which people in one time period or geographical region understand the concepts of people in another. This may be evident in the translation of texts from one language to another, or attempts to understand attitudes to the sky in past cultures, such as the mediaeval, classical or neolithic.

Speakers will be contacted directly.