Practical astrology in the early 11th-century Byzantium

abstract

MS Paris, BnF, gr. 2506 and other related manuscripts preserve a handful of horoscopes from the late 10th-century / early 11th-century Byzantium. These nativities, solar returns, and inceptions, which have not yet received a complete critical edition, were apparently devised by one anonymous astrologer, who exhibited a profound knowledge of his predecessors’ doctrines and advanced predictive techniques. The present talk is a summary analysis of these predictive techniques, some of which are not known to have been exemplified elsewhere.

about the speaker

Levente László is a classicist with a current research interest in the history of astrology. He received his PhD in 2023 with a dissertation on Hellenistic inceptional astrology and the horoscopes of the emperor Zeno’s anonymous astrologer. An independent scholar and a translator of Hellenistic and Byzantine astrological texts, he has published on the textual history of various Hellenistic astrological works.

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