A Conversation with Laura Ackerman Smoller

For our fall newsletter, URochester History undergraduate peer advisor, Alayna Leestma, interviewed Laura Smoller, one of URochester's History professors. In this interview, Prof. Smoller details her recent travels and current research. This interview contains edits for clarity purposes.

URochester History Department: Hi Dr. Smoller, it's great to sit down with you. To start, I just wanted to kind of give the readers some background on how you got into the field of history. So what drove you to study this field in particular?

Melk Abbey, Austria

Dr. Smoller: That's a good question, because I think, depending on when you ask me, I tell different stories. One of the stories I tell myself is that I hated history in high school, and then I got to college, and I took this medieval history class, basically, to fulfill a requirement. And the guy talked about the weirdest stuff, and I fell in love with it. But then there's another part of me that thinks, wait, when I was 11 years old, I was so into King Arthur. I read The Once and Future King, and I was totally in love with it. So, there's probably a little bit of truth to both, that the interest was there and perhaps had been tamped by high school history teaching, but definitely, I fell in love with medieval studies when I was in college and that was what I wanted to do.

URochester History Department: Yeah, no, I feel like that can ring true for a lot of people where it's not just one thing that pushes them into some avenue.

Dr. Smoller: [There are] two other things I'd like to say: one is that I wanted to be a writer, but I can't make up stories. And I realized the stuff that I study– can I say a bad word? You can't make this s— up. It's like, it's so weird. And the other thing is that I think what hooked me was, oh my gosh, there's so much weird stuff in the Middle Ages. I wanted to understand why that made sense. Now, only much later have I learned there are actually other periods of history in which there's weird stuff, and I could have actually probably been quite happy being a 19th century U.S. historian, but I didn't know there was weird stuff there because nobody ever taught it to me.

URochester History Department: For the next question, can you give an elevator pitch of your research interests?

Dr. Smoller: So ,what I'm working on right now is a book that's really a culmination of a lot of what I've been thinking about, basically my entire career, which is the relationship between astrology and prophecy in medieval and Renaissance Europe, and particularly how people were talking about using those techniques to discover the religious future. So, is there going to be some great change in Christianity? Is, as all medieval European Christians hoped, Islam going to come to an end? When is the apocalypse going to happen? And what I've been working through is both the ways in which the two could come together, even though they might seem to be very different modes of thinking about the future, one reasoning based on natural observations, and one getting information from divine inspiration. The two of them often come to be conflated, especially the later you get in the Middle Ages, but also, there are people who are quite upset about that and who are really trying to draw the lines, quite distinctly. And I don't think that either one of those voices comes to predominate in the conversation. I had hoped I was going to write a book about how astrology and prophecy became more and more blended the later you got. That's not what happens.  But I think the conversation becomes more intense and more raucous the closer you get to the year 1500.

URochester History Department: It’s interesting how you say that divine inspiration and natural observation sort of became conflated. Do you think, in early modern Europe, when it's kind of going beyond that period, that the push to differentiate the two intensified at some point?

Dr. Smoller: One would like to think so, right? Because we want to think of the Scientific Revolution as being all about becoming like modern scientists. One of the underlying arguments in my book is that it's in fact this bringing together, this conflation of astrology and prophecy, that helps to valorize the intensive study of the natural world and nature that in some senses propels what we call the Scientific Revolution. So… I'm arguing one of the ways in which astrology and prophecy come together is that authors will say the heavens are a book written by God's finger.  He's written basically all the past, present, and future in the stars; but also, the same people are saying that astrology, the means for reading and interpreting and understanding that book, is something that was given to human beings by God. So, you probably don't know this, but God infused the knowledge of astrology through inspiration into Old Testament figures: depending on which medieval author you're reading, Adam, or Seth, or Noah, or Noah's fourth son, whom you probably also haven't heard of. All of this is part of the conversation about astrology and prophecy. So, if you're saying reading the heavens through this God-given method of reading the heavens is a valid way of knowing the future, are you talking about some kind of rational scrutiny of nature or are you talking about another form of divine inspiration? And I think that valorization of studying nature as a means to God, and perhaps as a God-given means to God, is something for which you can actually follow a throughline, through figures like Ficino, who then gets read in 16th and 17th century Europe. And even someone like Francis Bacon in the early 17th century--who's often thought of as like, “oh, the guy that really talks about the scientific method:– Bacon's really kind of talking about the same sort of stuff a lot of the time.

URochester History Department: Right, for sure. I mean, even, I think in modern churches today, there's very much that viewpoint of God using creation as a means of communicating his nature or something along those lines.

Dr. Smoller: Yeah, it's that's there in scripture, right? Like, it's there in Genesis. Let the stars be both for lights and for signs. It's there in Romans, the invisible things of God are proclaimed by the visible things. It's there in scripture that nature is a path to God, and people talk about something called natural theology. But there's also, I think, a sense that modern Christianity can be quite hostile to science. I think the temptation is to read that hostility backwards, really far, and we like to caricature the Middle Ages as a time when religion had a strangle hold upon free thought. But actually, the more you read medieval thinkers, my students keep on saying, “How'd they get away with that?” And you think, “By the time you've asked this the 20th time, maybe that's not a valid question since everybody's getting away with it. Maybe you need to get rid of the assumption that somebody's trying to tamp down on speculation.”

URochester History Department: So, now, I'd also like to talk about the trip that you just came back from. First of all, where did you go?

Dr. Smoller: So, I was visiting three libraries, the Abbey Library of Melk, which is in Austria, about an hour train ride from Vienna. It was an important abbey from the seventh or eighth century. It was quite a wealthy abbey. It was very important for the Habsburgs and then the later emperors of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It's a pretty impressive edifice now, and it's still a working abbey. So, I was there first. Then I was at the Austrian National Library in Vienna, and finally, I was at the Bavarian State Library in Munich.

URochester History Department: And why were you traveling to all of these different libraries? What were you trying to find there?

Dr. Smoller: So, this was a trip mainly to finish the manuscript research for what will be the last chapter of the book that I'm working on about astrology and prophecy, which is a chapter where I'm tracing the fate of one particular medieval prophetic text that's important to me. One, because it talks a lot about the end of the world. But two, because it's really an entire history of the world that includes this story of astrology being divinely revealed to Noah's fourth son. So, I've been trying to look at every manuscript of this prophecy that was copied in German-speaking lands in the 15th century, when, as I realized, this prophecy became really important. It became really important in the 15th century, and it became especially important in German speaking lands. Part of that is because the prophecy deals a lot with the rise to world dominance of an Islamic empire, which in the 15th century seems to be absolutely talking about the Turks, and the prophecy also promises that a Christian emperor is going to defeat the Turks and make everything right. So, this is really appealing in the 15th century when the Ottoman Turks have come to real dominance, and especially after the takeover of Constantinople in 1453. I've been tracing how this manuscript is copied and read in 15th century German-speaking lands, and this was kind of a trip to see some more of these manuscripts. There are probably about 60 or 70 manuscripts just from that particular area and time period out of around 220, maybe 230 manuscripts that we have surviving of this prophecy altogether. I'm really interested in looking at variants in the text, but also what else is in the manuscript. If somebody was copying this, what else were they interested in copying? Are there any marginal marks, signs of what either the scribe or especially a reader or a later reader was thinking about this text? Like, if they make a mark next to the part about the Muslims, that's one sign that, “Oh, here's what they're interested in.” Do they make a mark next to here? So that's what was the main purpose for the trip, gathering the last few manuscripts I wanted to look at of this prophecy, which we call pseudo-Methodius.

URochester History Department: What is a Spark Notes version of this prophecy you’ve mentioned?

Austrian National Library, manuscript room

Dr. Smoller: So, the prophecy pretends to be written by a third century bishop and martyr named Methodius. It's really clear that it was actually written sometime in the seventh century, after the rise of Islam, and especially after the Arabs have taken basically the entire eastern Mediterranean seaboard. There's some debate about precisely when in the late 600s it was written, but it's really clear that's the milieu. And it's written, aimed, at Christians in these lands that have been taken over by Muslims who are feeling like they're under some kind of siege, and it's really written to tell them to put their hopes in the Byzantine emperor, that he's going to come in and conquer and make everything right. And it's a prophecy that gets translated. It's originally written in Syriac, it gets translated into Greek pretty quickly and into Latin pretty quickly because, if you think about it, there are Muslim invasions into Western Europe, starting in the early 700s. People in Latinate Western Europe were really excited about this, but it continues to be copied throughout the Middle Ages, and, as I said, it gets this real new lease on life in the later Middle Ages with the rise of the Ottoman Turks.  It becomes really, really important politically also because it's one of a couple of major prophecies that talk about a final Roman emperor who's going to be almost like a messianic ruler. And this is something that European rulers really like to try to identify themselves with. The most famous example is probably a little bit later, Charles V, who was the king of Spain and Hapsburg emperor in Germany during the Reformation… He constantly was trying to portray himself as this final emperor.

URochester History Department: And then for readers who may be interested in reading this project you're working on, when do you expect your book to be published?

Dr. Smoller: (Laughs)

URochester History Department: Or is that kind of a loaded question?

Dr. Smoller: So, I do have leave this year to work on finishing the research and writing. And I very ambitiously said I thought I would have a draft of the whole. And it's possible I will. I've been working on this project of on and off on the side for a long time. So portions of it exist in rather detailed talks that I've given here, there, and the other. I'm working on a chapter right now. That's one of the early chapters that's based on material that I haven't touched in probably 10 or 15 years, and what I've realized, and I'm afraid I'm going to realize this with all of my chapters, is that the story is a lot more complicated than I originally sussed out in my mind… Yes, I can use those sources, but I'm trying to trace a pretty complicated story of transmission of ideas and thoughts and, as I'd like to call them, conversations, that people are having about astrology, the religious future, prophecy, and how those come together. And I'm pretty bogged down in the weeds in the 12th century right now. I'm just about to get my way out into the early 1200s. Maybe it'll be smoother sailing after that.

URochester History Department: Thank you so much for sitting down and having this conversation. And I wish you the best of luck in your research endeavors.