Professor Laura Ackerman Smoller is out on leave this academic year, and she's using the time to dive into her NEH-supported book project on the intersections between astrology and prophecy in the later Middle Ages. In January, she sat down with us to tell us about her project and what she's been up to in her time away from her teaching and administrative responsibilities.
UR: Last year, the National Endowment for the Humanities announced that you had been awarded a fellowship to support your third book project—congratulations! What was the application process like for you, and how did it feel to receive the official notification?
LS: Well, I got the email late at night sometime around Christmas, and it was a total wonderful surprise. So that last question is an easy one to answer because they’re hard to get and I really didn’t expect to get it.
It was also fun putting the fellowship application together because this is material I’ve had on the back burner for a long time—probably almost 2 decades. I put a lot of it to the side to write my Vincent Ferrer book, but it’s been there in the back of my mind. Putting together the application made me realize two things: 1) that there was actually a way I could draw all of this disparate research together into a more or less coherent book, and 2) that if I slightly reframed the question I thought I was asking, it made a lot more sense.
I’ve been looking at the intersections between astrology and prophecy in the later Middle Ages, and I was intrigued by moments where it seemed to me that the two were completely conflated. It was the first project I ever worked on where I didn’t start with a body of sources that I really wanted to read. I started with something I wanted to find. And it turned out that trying to find those moments where astrology and prophecy appeared to overlap is a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack. Medieval manuscripts aren’t catalogued that way; nor is that something you can even type into Google. Putting together the material for the fellowship application helped me to realize that I wasn’t just looking for those moments, those needles in the haystack. What I was looking at was a series of conversations in which medieval thinkers and authors thought through and argued about the relationship between prophecy and astrology.
UR: You finished your term as chair of the department last summer, and you’ve been on leave for this academic year. What has the time away enabled you to do?
LS: The most important thing about being on leave is that word you said: time. It’s really impossible to focus on research during a semester when you’re teaching. Maybe in a normal semester I can devote every Friday to my research, but that means I actually have to remember what I was writing or thinking or reading a week ago. So the luxury of not forgetting is the most incredible gift of leave time. It always frustrates me that administrators don’t realize just how cheap it is to support research in the humanities, because I don’t need a lab. I don’t even always need to travel to do my research. I just need uninterrupted time.
With that uninterrupted time, I’ve been doing a lot of looking at material in medieval manuscripts. One of the chapters of the book is going to be about a prophecy, The Revelations of pseudo-Methodius (scholars call it that because it pretends to have been written by the early Christian bishop and martyr Methodius), and a commentary that was written about that prophecy in 1496. And the commentary is really important because it gives us a glimpse of how at least one person was reading that prophecy. It’s the only commentary on that prophecy we have.
From that, it’s clear what my one commentator was thinking, but we know of 220 or more Latin manuscripts of pseudo-Methodius from the Middle Ages. Is that what everybody who copied or read one of those manuscripts was thinking about that prophecy? So I’ve been looking at a lot of those manuscripts, and I’ve been helped greatly by the fact that so many of them have been digitized. This has enabled me to look at a lot of things without having to spend a lot of time on airplanes. And I’m getting a sense of how this prophecy is being read and how a certain interpretation of it comes to the fore.
UR: How can you get a sense of how people in the Middle Ages were understanding pseudo-Methodius just by looking at the manuscripts of the prophecy?
One of the ways to understand how people are thinking through prophecy is to look at the manuscripts themselves to see if they’re bound with other prophecies or other astrological works, or to see if anybody has commented in the margins. I write all over my books, and some future scholar is going to love my library because they’ll have a sense of what I was thinking! I love when people write in their manuscripts. Even if somebody’s just taking a note, you can tell this reader thought that was important. And sometimes we can tell by the hand[writing] that somebody was reading this manuscript 200 years later and noticing these things. So that’s what I spent a lot of time doing in the fall.
UR: What are you diving into this spring?
LS: I’ve turned now to another chapter in this book-to-be, which is about conversations about the Magi, the wise men who followed the star to find Jesus after his birth. From the very get-go, from the earliest Christian commentators, that’s a passage that has raised the question of astrology and its validity. I’ve been invited to give a talk at USC in February, and I’m going to talk about the Magi.
I’m also going to Paris in April to give a talk at a one-day colloquium at the CNRS, the National Center for Scientific Research. It’s one day devoted to a French cardinal, Pierre d’Ailly, who wrote about astrology. He was the subject of my first book, and he’s also going to be featured in this new book because he used astrology to predict when Antichrist was coming. And then I intend to go to Germany and Austria to look at some more manuscripts, probably in May.
UR: What have been the highlights of your leave so far? Any particularly exciting discoveries or people you’ve gotten to talk to?
LS: Two weeks ago, I was at the American Society for Church History giving a paper about my commentary. At that conference was Dr. Christopher Bonura, who’s done a lot of work on pseudo-Methodius. He wrote a doctoral dissertation and is now working on a book about the original version of the prophecy. Unbeknownst to me, he’s decided he needs a last chapter on how this prophecy was read throughout the Middle Ages. And he didn’t know that I was working on pseudo-Methodius. So he came to my paper, and we had an absolutely delightful hourlong conversation afterwards, just absolutely nerding out about pseudo-Methodius. So that’s been the most recent highlight.
Another really fun highlight was finding one manuscript that had a picture in it. To my knowledge, pseudo-Methodius was not typically circulated with illustrations until the second printing of my commentary, when some woodcuts were added, but I knew of no manuscript illustrations related to this prophecy. But then I was scrolling through looking at this one version that’s in the National Library in Vienna. And there at the bottom of one page was an adorable little illumination of one of the really bizarre parts of this prophecy.
In this Christian prophecy, there’s probably about five pages devoted to Alexander the Great, and he comes upon all of these horrible unclean peoples. He sees them, and he prays to God to do something about them by moving two mountains close together and putting up some bronze gates so the people are stuck behind them (and can’t come out until the end of time). So in the Vienna manuscript, there’s this darling illumination of these unclean peoples, and they’re chomping away on body parts. And there’s a weird little animal off to the side, which I think is meant to be some sort of a snake that they’re about to eat. It’s probably a good thing I wasn’t in the library because I squealed with delight. And I immediately sent the picture to all my friends I thought I would be most excited about it. But, again, this image is a clue into what one copyist thought was the most important part of the pseudo-Methodius prophecy.