Additionally, it put forward several signs regarding the correspondence between constellations and weather. It advises that Boreas, a northerly wind, signals rain when it brings clouds (lines 552–53). Hesiod’s Works and Days is the earliest extant work that addresses this topic. These collections list the sky’s appearances or behavior of animals, along with the rising and settings of constellations that mark the seasons and served as potential indicators for changes in the weather (Taub 2003, pp. Weather signs form the subject matter of a coherent genre of ancient writings, which poets, encyclopedists, and philosophers pursued. 2. Weather SignsĪstrological works, however, were not the only vector for the transmission of techniques of weather forecasting. Girolamo Cardano’s consideration of weather prediction illustrates one approach to this reconciliation that spurred him to develop novel natural philosophical theories regarding winds as he reevaluated Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Hippocrates. Accurate forecasts were difficult to achieve, and competing theories derived from medical, astrological, and poetical traditions were not readily synthesized. 25–33.) Annual forecasts, however widespread and popular, nevertheless, represent only part of Renaissance understandings and practices of weather forecasting, which over the course of the sixteenth century became increasingly integrated with natural philosophy. Since Gustav Hellmann’s studies, written a century ago, scholars have recognized these writings as the product of a flowering publishing activity (Hellmann 1921 Pettegree 2010, pp. These forecasts, based on astrological formulations, formed a highly circulating, popular genre. At the end of his career, which he mostly spent writing commentaries on Hippocratic writings, he integrated his understanding of weather signs with Hippocratic rules of prognosis, revising traditional understandings of the causes of winds.ĭuring the Renaissance, calendars, almanacs, and practicae offered annual predictions for the weather. While it might be expected that Cardano would have emphasized astrological tools for weather forecasting, instead he went in a different direction, namely, embracing the ancient tradition of weather signs and revising Aristotelian theories of winds. While many of his Aristotelian predecessors understood weather prediction as distinct from meteorology as a natural philosophical field, Cardano’s profound interest in conjectural arts and probabilistic reasoning led him to tie causal explanations to methods of forecasting future conditions of the air and their effects on humans, especially regarding health and disease. Meteorology, for Cardano, links abstract knowledge to the practical and operative. It held together his encyclopedism by tying the celestial realm to the sublunary world and human action. The subject of meteorology was central to Girolamo Cardano’s thought.
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