Since the 1990s, history of astrology has become a flourishing topic on which dozens of books and papers are published annually. However, there is something strange about this literature: it appears to have great difficulty in bridging the divide between pre-modern and late modern history. Already, few historical studies consider astrology beyond c. 1650 CE; but it is next to impossible to find original and reliable research on astrology in the late modern period (c. 1800 CE and beyond). This situation is even stranger when we compare it to the history of science, medicine, and technology as a whole, where historians predominantly research and publish on late modernity.

This is not a contingency of the practitioners of history of astrology (connected to contingencies of training, career paths, or research funding), but an effect of basic methodological choices they make. To effectively bridge the forementioned divide, we cannot simply extend our chronological reach (“add late modern astrology and stir”), but should first address specific limitations in how we construct astrology as a research object. These built-in methodological limitations pertain to the habit of approaching astrology as a technique for generating predictive knowledge, once supported by authoritative institutions. This habit almost inevitably anachronizes astrology and turns it into an essentially pre-modern activity which supposedly can only “adapt” or “survive” in the late modern world.

Having made this diagnosis, the project lays out an alternative, non-anachronizing interpretation of astrology. Drawing on its frequent self-presentation as a science of (astral) government, we claim that astrology has always been far more than an institutionally authorized purveyor of information about the future. At heart, astrology has especially been valued (and criticized) for its larger ambition to offer an empowering practice of self-government.

Finally, the substance of the project showcases the beneficial historiographic effects of this methodological alternative. First, we offer a refreshingly different narrative of astrology’s transformations that seamlessly moves between the 15^th and the 19^th centuries CE, and hence across the pre-modern/late modern divide. Second, we uncover astrological practice of self-government as one site where simultaneous forms of (astral, religious, political, economic) government are constantly analyzed, re-calibrated, and practically negotiated. Astrological practice is analyzed as an everyday laboratory where new and practicable solutions to the question “how to be governed?” can be essayed.