Astrology and the Seventeenth Century Mind: William Lilly and the Language of the Stars

Ann Geneva's 1995 study is the standard modern academic account of William Lilly, the most prominent English astrologer of the seventeenth century, and of the astrological culture that made his almanacs a genuine force in Interregnum political life. Its central argument concerns Lilly's 1651 pamphlet Monarchy or No Monarchy in England, sixteen pages of hieroglyphic woodcuts that Lilly himself described as representing "the future condition of the English Nation" in deliberately obscure form. Two of the images, a burning city and a pair of twins over flames, were read after 1666 as having predicted the Great Fire of London fifteen years in advance. Geneva reads the hieroglyphs as encoded commentary on the political and religious conflicts of 1651 aimed at Lilly's contemporary readers, not as literal foreknowledge of a specific future event, situating the later "prediction" reading as a retrospective one imposed once the Fire had already happened. Use it for the modern scholarly account of what the images most plausibly meant to their first readers.