“The Terriblest Eclipse That Hath Been Seen in Our Days”: Black Monday and the Debate on Astrology during the Interregnum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One result of the dominance of the concept of the “Scientific Revolution” over the study of early modern thought about nature has been that different cultural practices concerning the natural world have been conceived as either on the side of the revolution or against it. Recovery of occult or “unscientific” belief such as astrology or alchemy has either claimed that these activities contributed to the advance of science, as Richard Westfall describes alchemy as part of the Scientific Revolution, or ascribed a positive value to the occult and a negative one to the Scientific Revolution itself. However, to rethink the Scientific Revolution requires the examination of the uses of nature in the early modern period without presupposing either the “scientific” nature of these practices or the “revolutionary” nature of their changes and conflicts. This essay is an attempt to read the English reception of a particular incident – the “Black Monday” solar eclipse of March 29, 1652 – not as an episode in the Scientific Revolution (although such a reading is possible), but as the clash of a variety of positions on natural phenomena and their meaning for humanity. The English Interregnum, the period between the execution of King Charles I in 1649 and the Restoration of his son Charles II in 1660, saw a passionate debate on both the popular and learned levels on the validity of judicial astrology. The two most influential discussions of the decline of judicial astrology in early modern England have been those of Keith Thomas, in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), and Patrick Curry, in Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England (1989).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".