Jesse L. Rosenberger Work-In-Progress Seminar Series: Laura Smoller, "Star-Gazers from the Mount of Victory: The Magi and Astrology in Medieval and Renaissance Europe"

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Laura Ackerman Smoller

Arthur R. Miller Professor of History

Professor of History

PhD, Harvard, 1991

Smoller’s research has focused on areas of intersection between magic, science, and religion in medieval and Renaissance Europe, centering around two major themes: astrology and apocalyptic prophecy, and saints and miracles. My first book, History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The Christian Astrology of Pierre d’Ailly, 1350-1420 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), explores a French cardinal’s use of astrology to investigate the time of the world’s End. She argues that d’Ailly, worried about intractable papal Schism and hoping that a church council could bring the crisis to an end, turned to astrology as a way to silence the numerous forces that saw the Great Schism as a preamble to Antichrist’s reign and thus, by implication, incapable of resolution by human efforts. In 2014, I published a second monograph: The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby: The Cult of Vincent Ferrer in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), winner of the 2016 La corónica International Book Award. Here I study the canonization and cult of the Valencian friar Vincent Ferrer, a fiery apocalyptic preacher of the Schism years who died in 1419 and was canonized in 1455, tracing the various meanings of the saint from the moment of his death in Brittany to his appropriation by Dominican friars in Spain’s New World colonies.

More recently, she has returned to the interrelationships between astrology and prophecy in a new book project, tentatively titled “Astrology and the Sibyls,” an investigation of ways of knowing the future ranging from around 1100 to around 1600, research supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2022-23. In addition, I have been exploring the connections between sanctity, mendicant reform, and tales of the demonic in a series of papers, articles, and book chapters focusing on the cults of Vincent Ferrer and Bernardino of Siena.