The Cosmographical Glass by S. K. Heninger, Jr.

Abstract

stories, we might be better able to understand the separation which is cer­ tainly there in the last books of the extant poem. Otherwise a preoccupation with special tricks and schemes, or with some indefinite general subversion, may lead us to miss crucial questions and leave the elements of the poem isolated, even if tied up in a knot of correspondences. Something of this does happen in the present book. It remains, nevertheless, a thoughtful, energetic study: if the poem in Professor Cain’s account loses its buoyancy, he himself never does, and while some of his findings may be more convincing than others, he has given us an abundance of things worth thinking about. ja m es carscallen / University of Toronto S. K. Heninger, Jr., The Cosmographical Glass (San Marino, California: The Huntington Library, 1977). xx, 210. $17.50 For many generations of students studying the Renaissance and Shakespeare, E. M. Tillyard’s Elizabethan World Picture has been a miniature bible. Like many other concise handbooks, that worthy but oversimplified work tended to blinker and constrict. For this reason, among many others, S. K. Heninger ’s Cosmographical Glass is particularly welcome. It provides a fairly com­ prehensive and balanced view of the world systems espoused in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including the six outlined in Riccioli’s Almagestum Novum (1651 ), and constantly reminds us that (as in Renaissance theory and practice of writing history) there is no completely unified viewpoint among the writers; neither is there a consistent evolution of ideas, so that a theoretician might continue to espouse a concept supposedly laid to rest a hundred years earlier. Heninger could also have added that literary writers often adopted theories of the cosmos for artistic purposes which they them­ selves realized were untenable scientifically. As might be expected, Heninger displays a comprehensive knowledge of background as well as a close understanding of his texts. His presentation is orderly and logical, though occasionally lost in detail. He uses as his starting point William Cuningham’s publication of 1559, from which the title of his own work is derived, and quickly introduces Blundeville’s definition of cos­ mography as “ the description of the whole world, that is to say, of heaven and earth, and all that is contained therein.” Taking these staggeringly large terms of reference for his brief, he divides his main study into five chapters headed Creation, the Geocentric Universe, the Pythagorean-Platonic tradi­ tion, the Human Microcosm, and Contingent Systems. Though the chrono­ 12 logical system of the first three chapters is broken by the late introduction of the Pythagorean notions, in other respects the sequence is the best for feed­ ing the material to the reader. The overlap is not very great, and what repetition there is occurs (unaccountably) within a given chapter, as, for example, the stating three times that Galileo avoided the question of an infinite world, and twice that his opponent, Riccioli, endeavoured to use scientific rather than theological arguments in his refutation. Heninger’s main method of demonstrating the current theories is through a set of 117 superbly printed illustrations, most of them highly illuminating and many of them very detailed (e.g., the tables of correspondences, 122-23) • Certainly, each of the self-explanatory pictures is worth a thousand words, and all the others considerably reduce the amount of theoretical description. The commentary is subservient to the illustrations in most cases, and, as the author claims, it is intended to explain rather than to argue, though this rule is sometimes broken, albeit skilfully and unobtrusively. Considering the complexity of the topics, the text is surprisingly lucid and the summaries are both clear and courageous, especially on the Ptolemaic and Copernican theories, the position of Galileo, and the more knotty ques­ tion of Pico and Agrippa. It is also useful to be told (or reminded) that Copernicus was in some respects a traditionalist. The explications of the figures are generally researched with care and reinforced with analogies from other sources, though occasionally the argument seems a little specious (e.g., the comments on the Calvinism in Fig. 11). Heninger also occasionally ap­ plies a given theory or illustration to the explication of...