Book Review: Insights into Astronomia Nova: Kepler: La Physique Celeste, Autour de l'Astronomia Nova (1609)

Abstract

INSIGHTS INTO ASTRONOMIA NOVA Kepler: La Physique Celeste, Autour de /'Astronomia Nova (1609). Edited by Edouard Mehl with collaboration of Nicolas Roudet (Les Belles Lettres, Paris, 2011). Pp. 358. euro39. ISBN 978-2-251-42046-2.This collection includes thirteen diverse papers, in German, French, and English, presented at a December 2008 Strasbourg conference celebrating (just in the nick of time) the 400th anniversary of Johannes Kepler' s great Astronomia nova of 1 609 . It begins with a poignant appreciation by Nick Jardine of the late Alain Segonds, who among his many other accomplishments wrote knowledgeably and incisively on Kepler.Edouard Mehl's introduction to the volume lays out some of the paradoxes surrounding the Astronomia nova. The first and most personal work of Kepler's maturity, it is frequently obscured by the youthful Mysterium cosmographicum, whose charming foreshadowing of what we now regard as Kepler's most important discoveries suffers hardly at all from its lack of astronomical sophistication. The Mysterium offers students a lot of Kepler per page, without the lengthy, torturous, repetitive, and highly technical obstacles of the Astronomia nova . Yet the Astronomia nova had far more impact on professional astronomers in the period we think of as the Astronomical Revolution.The conference that generated the papers in this volume tried to restore balance to our appreciation of Kepler by focusing on the Astronomia nova, assuredly Kepler's most important contribution to astronomy. The Mysterium had tried to convince its readers that the recently proposed heliocentric arrangement of planets was an attractive idea; the Astronomia nova dragged its readers through a detailed analysis that demolished all the models that astronomers had ever used, only to build a new astronomy from the observations of Tycho Brahe, but also from celestial physics - to use the phrase Kepler defiantly employed in his title and that Mehl has picked up in the title of this volume.Isabelle Pantin's essay looks at the Astronomia nova as a significant moment in the history of the book. Kepler had a precise, and rather demanding, idea of how the pages of his book should appear. Pantin builds much of her argument around the work of James Voelkel. She discusses the material constraints of printing and points out how Kepler exploited these constraints for his own purposes. Under legal pressure from Tycho's son-in-law, Franz Tengnagel, Kepler included an introductory note in which Tengnagel warns readers not to heed Kepler's physical arguments; but Kepler buried the note amidst a sheaf of front matter to such an extent that it effectively lost its intended function as the introduction to the work (p. …