How to Read a Source Record
A citation names an edition, not a work. Knowing the difference (and what a verification status and a rights status actually commit you to) is the first expert skill, and it is not an astrological one.
Cross-traditionHistorical scholarshipEditorial synthesis
In this lesson
- Distinguish a work from the edition actually cited
- Explain why rights status attaches to an edition rather than to a work
- State what an unverified record may and may not be used for here
- Judge when a citation supports a claim and when it merely decorates it
Every claim on this platform that is not a calculation points at a source record. Those records are more specific than they look, and reading them properly changes what you can conclude.
A citation names an edition
The Tetrabiblos is a second-century work. The record this library cites is a particular nineteenth-century English translation of it, digitised from a specific later printing. Those are three different objects, and a claim about one is not automatically a claim about another.[1]
This matters practically. A translator's choices, and the notes an editor adds, are part of what you are reading. Where this library relies on such a note it says so rather than presenting it as the original author's words.[1]
Rights attach to editions too
A work being centuries old does not make every edition of it freely reusable: a modern translation or critical edition carries its own rights. That is why records here carry a licence status per edition and why a citation-only record can be referred to but not reproduced.[2]
Verification is a claim about the record, not about the doctrine
A record marked verified means its bibliographic identity was checked against a live catalogue or resolver: that the thing exists, in that edition, with those identifiers. It says nothing whatsoever about whether the doctrine inside is true.
When a citation is doing no work
The failure to watch for is a citation attached to a claim the source does not actually make. It is easy to produce and hard to notice, because the presence of a reference is itself persuasive.
- Does the cited edition discuss this specific point, or a neighbouring one?
- Is the source being used for a historical claim it can support, or for a factual claim about the world that it cannot?[3]
- Could the author of that edition have known about the thing being claimed?
The last question is not hypothetical here, and a later lesson in this section works through a case where the answer is no.
In brief
A citation names an edition, not a work: translation, printing and editorial notes are part of what is cited, and rights attach per edition. A verified status means the record's identity was confirmed, not that its doctrine is true, and an unverified record stays off public surfaces entirely. The failure to watch for is a citation attached to a claim its source never makes.
Check your understanding
Check your understanding:
- Why is 'the Tetrabiblos' not precise enough to be a citation here?
- What exactly does a verified verification status assert?
- Give one test for whether a citation actually supports the claim beside it.
References
Numbered citations in the text link to the records below; each record links to the full source registry.
- Claudius Ptolemy. Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, or Quadripartite: Being Four Books of the Influence of the Stars. J. M. Ashmand (translator). W. Foulsham & Co. Ltd, London. 1900. Historical primary source View source record
- William Lilly. Christian Astrology, Modestly Treated of in Three Books. T. Brudenell for J. Partridge & H. Blunden, London. 1647. Historical primary source View source record
- Nicholas Campion. A History of Western Astrology, Volume I: The Ancient and Classical Worlds. Continuum. 2009. Historical scholarship View source record