From Dante's Moonspots to Galileo's Sunspots

Abstract

The unscheduled astronomical event seems to have left the strangest of traces in the early modern era. At stake was a personnel problem: the wrong people may well have been the first to witness the emergence of new stars, meteors, and large sunspots in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and the right people were often enough without adequate explanation of these phenomena. Popular reaction to these occurrences is, and will doubtless remain, almost wholly lost to us, but a persistent doubling occurs at the site of the intellectual exchanges concerning them. A factitious tone, often established through the comparatively low registers of dialogue, dialect, and reported speech, maintained or created social and intellectual distance between discourses otherwise lacking sufficient distinction, and generated the impression of a steady evolution in scientific representation. Moreover, if the rapid development of a research-oriented natural philosophy in the early modern period depended upon the unprecedented combination of a crude and relatively unsystematic empiricism with improved instrumentation and an increasing reliance on quantification, it is plausible that the frequent inclusion of the pseudo-popular perspective in descriptions of puzzling celestial events signaled at once an awareness of the importance of the empirical view, and a self-conscious recognition of its shortcomings.1 Fictionalized low- and middle-brow views of the sunspots of 16111613, the focal point of this essay, are perhaps the most plentiful 1 On rapid-discovery science in the context of early modern Europe, see Collins,