No. 99774721

David Origanus - ASTROLOGIA NATURALIS - 1645
No. 99774721

David Origanus - ASTROLOGIA NATURALIS - 1645
Astrologia naturalis (1645), first and only edition: an authoritative early-seventeenth-century survey of natural/general astrology with numerous exemplar nativities.
THE BOOK:
David Origanus (David Tost) — Astrologia naturalis, (Massiliae: Io. Baptistae Senii Genuensis, 1645). §⁴, §§², †⁴, ††⁴, †††⁴, A–Lll⁴.
4to (approx. 22.2 × 15.9 cm over boards), [36], 454, [2] pp. Complete. (as issued); numerous woodcut diagrams and figures in text; printer’s device on title. Full contemporary parchment (vellum) over boards.
MOUSEION CURATOR NOTE:
“One of the most important early-seventeenth-century treatises of astrology. Practical, diagram-rich, Astrologia naturalis fuses theory and practice in a single, illustrated course of the heavens.”
BOOK DESCRIPTION:
Printed at Marseille in 1645 by the Genoese printer Io. Baptistae Senii, this is the first and only edition of Origanus’s consummate treatise on natural astrology.
Richly supplied with diagrams and didactic nativities, it features charts for well-known figures: Pope Paul III, Charles V, Calvin, Erasmus, Pietro Bembo, Cardano, Regiomontanus, Galeazzo Sforza, Savonarola.
The title promises a manual “plainly necessary” for physicians, husbandmen, and sailors, and the book delivers: dozens of woodcut schemes of houses, aspects, and exemplary nativities/decumbitures turn doctrine into practice.
Origanus (1558–1629), a Silesian mathematician-astronomer at Frankfurt (Oder), was widely known for his ephemerides and for inhabiting that generational bridge between Renaissance computational astronomy and mid-seventeenth-century debates on method. Astrologia naturalis preserves a Central-European voice in Latin astrological print, newly issued for a Mediterranean readership from a bustling port city whose printers straddled Franco-Italian networks.
PROVENANCE:
Early ownership: old ink inscription on the title page, later struck through.
MOUSEION CURATOR NOTE:
“Among the era’s defining treatises on natural (“general”) astrology, this Marseille quarto teaches Europe to read the heavens in squares and numbers—clear, authoritative, and made for work.”
CONDITION REPORT:
A well-preserved seventeenth-century scientific quarto in contemporary parchment:
Binding: full vellum over boards; joints sound; mild toning and a few handling spots.
Showing honest signs of age and historical use—notable dampstaining at some leaves and scattered visible foxing/tidemarks.
An honest, unrestored example—appealing for both study and display.
ADDITIONAL CONTEXT:
Astrologia naturalis belongs to the last robust wave of comprehensive astrological manuals (1640s–1660s) before the genre contracted into almanacs and before “natural influences” were re-theorized under new physical philosophies. Origanus’s perspective—computationally literate, pragmatically framed—integrates Aristotelian meteorology, Galenic medicine, and the applied astronomy of tables. Issued in a major Mediterranean entrepôt, the book is also a material witness to the transregional circulation of scientific print: a German author printed by a Genoese in France for readers who crossed languages and seas.
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