Art & Creativity Quote by John Aubrey

Aubrey slips a joke into the costume of scholarship, and that disguise is the point. By invoking “astrologers and historians” in the same breath, he yokes two rival ways of explaining the world and treats them as equally credentialed. It’s a very 17th-century move: the age is mid-pivot from Renaissance occult “learning” to early modern empiricism, and Aubrey - a compulsive collector of lives, rumors, and oddities - thrives in the overlap.

The “ascendant as of Oxford” turns a university into a body with a birth chart, as if a place could be fated the way a person is. That personification flatters Oxford’s self-myth (ancient, ordained, authoritative) while slyly reducing it to cosmic paperwork. Capricorn and Saturn do the heavy lifting: Saturn is traditionally cold, severe, ascetic, and slow. Calling it “a religious planet” and “patron of religious men” sounds like praise, but it carries an edge. Saturn’s virtues are also its vices - rigidity, melancholy, an allergy to pleasure - which maps neatly onto stereotypes of clerics and scholars in a cloistered institution.

Underneath, Aubrey is commenting on Oxford’s temperament: its seriousness, its conservative gravity, its habit of mistaking restraint for righteousness. The line works because it can be repeated as a pious compliment or a knowing jab, depending on the listener. In an England still scarred by civil war and religious faction, that ambiguity isn’t just witty; it’s self-protective. Aubrey offers a portrait of institutional identity while keeping one eyebrow raised.