New sources for history of early modern astronomy

Abstract

Several comets and new stars drew European eyes between 1572 and 1618, a period of new worlds, warring Empires, and Christian schism. Historians of astronomy have, understandably, centred on luminaries like Kepler and Galileo to see how objects like the supernova of 1604 cracked the crystalline purity of the Aristotelian worldview. More recently, following Sarah Schechner's study of popular interest in comets (1997), we have begun to learn how such celestial novelties mattered throughout European culture. Tessicini and Boner's collection of essays spans these two approaches, connecting the history of celestial novelties with broader intellectual, political, and religious histories of early modern Europe.One theme is the ways early moderns turned to history to make sense of comets. Adam Mosley opens with a study of how the historical record was used to debate the worth of astrology. Antoine Mizauld and those inspired by Melanchthon found that history supports the inference that comets do, in fact, portend human affairs. Others, from Thomas Erastus to Thaddaeus Hegacius, disagreed, based on the same evidence as extracted from the new genre of comet catalogues. Not that astrologers grew scarce during the period; Tayra M.C. Lanuza Navarro and Victor Navarro Brotons show that commentaries on comets written in Spain were driven by astrological assumptions; history showed the validity of astrological prediction and heavenly conjunctions in turn explained the great turning points in history. As Nick Jardine argues, Christoph Rothman's Dialexis on the comet of 1585 exemplifies historia as collections of observationes .History also mattered in political and confessional battles. Boner and Francesco Barreca together unfold the rhetorical layers of Kepler's dedicatory letters to Rudolph II, showing how Kepler coupled the comet of 1604 with the rise and fall of war with the Ottomans and the Hungarian Rebellion, with the comet and conflicts all fading by 1606. Celestial novelties and their meaning for empire gave Kepler a chance to defend, at one stroke, his salary and the new Copernican theory. The science of the stars divided along confessional lines, as Isabelle Pantin shows for the Carmelite Francesco Giuntini, suspected of Lutheran sympathies for his astrology. To answer suspicions, he shored up positions associated with Gemma Frisius and Melanchthon using a longer tradition of ancient and medieval authorities, thus blurring confessional lines. Elide Casali similarly finds Christian motivations for astronomy across the period, despite great changes in the nature of astronomy. In response to the comet of 1577, Italian comet literature presented the interpreter of the stars as the Christian sapiens . But after 1618--after the study of the stars had been mathematized and mechanized, Casali contends--Italian comet literature evinced the same 'Christian astrology', so that 'religious and devotional sentiments' drove accounts of comets no less than before (131).Several contributions describe what celestial novelties meant for medicine, natural philosophy, and planetary theory. John Henry describes the French physician Jean Fernel's De abditis rerum causis , which underscored the ongoing significance of celestial influences for reformist approaches to medicine. …