Stars, states, and salvation. Recalibrating government in Morin’s astrology

Abstract

This paper historicizes the Astrologia Gallica (1661) by Jean-Baptiste Morin, a text traditionally celebrated by modern practitioners as a purely technical, analytical milestone in early modern horoscope interpretation. Rather than viewing Morin’s method merely as an epistemic or predictive technology, this study reframes it as a spiritual, ethical, and political intervention. It argues that Morin’s astrology functioned as a sophisticated art of self-government designed to navigate three overlapping regimes of rule that, in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, were increasingly experienced as unstable: astral causality, political authority, and divine providence.