SOURCE: "Astrology and Society," in Familiar to All: William Lilly and Astrology in the Seventeenth Century, Jonathan Cape, 1975, pp. 46-68.

In this excerpt, Parker discusses the views of Elizabethan society on the nature and uses of astrology.

 Were the stars only made to light
Robbers and Burglarers by night?
To wait on Drunkards, Thieves, Gold-finders,
And Lovers solacing behind doors,
Or giving one another Pledges
Of matrimony under Hedges?
[Hudibras (II, II:817)] 

It is difficult for a twentieth-century reader to understand the true position of an astrologer in sixteenth- or seventeenth-century society. We are so conditioned to the present popular reputation of astrology—founded on the Sun-sign newspaper columns which originated in the 1920s—that it is the common impression that astrology is too simple a system to have been taken seriously by an intelligent person for any historical period.

Bernard Capp discusses the use of astrology within...