upennmanuscripts:It’s been a while since we posted a volvelle, so here you go! This animated gif of
upennmanuscripts:It’s been a while since we posted a volvelle, so here you go! This animated gif of a volvelle, created by our photographer Andrea Nunoz, is from Ms. Codex 1663 (fol. 16r), a compilation of two books, the first on mathematics and judicial astrology and the second concerning palmistry. Ms. Codex 1663, a late seventeenth-century manuscript from Florence, is fully digitized and available on Penn in Hand. “Judicial astrology” is a term I’d not heard before; according to the entry on judicial astrology in Wikipedia, “The term … was mainly used in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance to mean the types of astrology that were considered to be heretical by the Catholic church, distinguished from the ‘natural astrology’ such as medical astrology and meteorological astrology, which were seen as acceptable because they were a part of the natural sciences of the time.”The book on palmistry (aka palm reading) includes several diagrams, which we also include above (fols. 122r, 134v, 139v, 151v, 152r, and 153r). -- source link