Editing Zodiac (section)

=== Middle Ages ===
[[File:Angers Cathedral South Rose Window of Christ with Zodiac.jpg|thumb|Angers Cathedral South Rose Window of Christ (center) with elders (bottom half) and zodiac (top half). Medieval stained glass by Andre Robin after the fire of 1451]]

During the [[Abbasid Caliphate|Abbasid era]], Greek reference books were translated into [[Arabic]], and [[Astronomy in the medieval Islamic world|Islamic astronomers]] then did their own observations, correcting Ptolemy's Almagest. One such book was [[Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi|Al-Sufi]]'s ''[[Book of Fixed Stars]]'', which has pictorial depictions of 48 constellations. The book was divided into three sections: constellations of the zodiac, constellations north of the zodiac, and southern constellations. When Al-Sufi's book, and other works, were translated in the 11th century, there were mistakes made in the translations. As a result, some stars ended up with the names of the constellation they belong to (e.g. [[Hamal]] in Aries).

The High Middle Ages saw a revival of interest in [[Greco-Roman magic]], first in [[Kabbalism]] and later continued in [[Renaissance magic]]. This included magical uses of the zodiac, as found, e.g., in the [[Sefer Raziel HaMalakh]].

The zodiac is found in medieval [[stained glass]] as at [[Angers Cathedral]], where the master glass maker, André Robin, made the ornate [[rosette window|rosettes]] for the North and South transepts after the fire there in 1451.<ref>King, David. '[http://vidimus.org/issues/issue-48/feature/ Angers Cathedral] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131217215830/http://vidimus.org/issues/issue-48/feature/ |date=17 December 2013 }}', (book review of Karine Boulanger's 2010 book, ''Les Vitraux de la Cathédrale d'Angers'', the 11th volume of the ''Corpus Vitrearum'' series from France), ''Vitemus:  the only on-line magazine devoted to medieval stained glass'', Issue 48, February 2011, retrieved 17 December 2013.</ref>