Old Wives’ Tales and the New World System: Gilbert, Galileo, and Kepler Eileen Reeves (bio) “Avoid absurd stories and old wives’ tales,” Paul warns the faithful in his first Letter to Timothy, and while the exact relationship between the two proscribed genres of ineptae fabulae and aniles fabulae remains unclear, his advice forms part of a long tradition of hostility to those foolish fables of toothless crones. 1 Apart from a few benign references to old wives’ tales in the Gorgias and the Republic, the casual appropriation of one such anecdote by Horace’s chatty Cervius in his Satires, and the magnificent story of Cupid and Psyche that forms the centerpiece of Apuleius’s Golden Ass, the aniles fabulae of antiquity were, it would seem, among the most regrettable of all narrative efforts. 2 Sometimes a byword for simple superstition—nothing more offensive than the mild ravings of aged and simple-minded women—old wives’ tales, and above all their tellers, were more frequently associated with leisure and laziness, late nights, hard drinking, [End Page 301] and long-windedness. 3 Entrusted, in their idle moments of tale-spinning and cloth-weaving, with the chastity of their young female charges, and saddled with the care of small children, the old wives of the ancient world were at best tireless purveyors of ignorance, at worst active corruptors of youth. 4 The range of their stories was evidently vast, partaking at once of the fatalistic, the fantastic, and the practical: old wives told of the force of destiny, of the **μ*′* (a blood-sucking, baby-devouring witch), of handy ways of curing fevers and of charms against herpes, of encounters with strange demons, of the cozy adventures of country and city mice, of the true meaning of dreams, of exotic freshwater seas and the Nilotic hippopotami, and of the banal quarrels of friends and family. 5 Not infrequently, these marginal women told something of themselves, their tales of wicked hags and bickering crones mirroring their own rather precarious social position. To my knowledge, apart from a few magic spells for drawing down the moon and an alleged belief that the setting sun sizzled upon contact with the ocean, they had little or nothing to say about astronomical matters, and yet the aniles fabulae figure importantly in three works of early modern Copernicans: On the Loadstone of William Gilbert, [End Page 302] the Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Galileo Galilei, and the Dream of Johannes Kepler. 6 In what follows I will first describe the evolution of this neglected genre, and then discuss the social function of references to such tales in the context of theories of the new world system. Thus while the old wives’ tale is normally associated by Gilbert, Galileo, and Kepler with all that impedes scientific progress—naïve superstition, reliance on older lore rather than contemporary experimentation, and genuine stupidity—in each case the teller of such tales also emerges, precisely because of her social marginalization, as a likely advocate for the most advanced and questionable aspect of Copernicanism, the theory of extraterrestrial life. Put differently, the old wives who populate these scientists’ imaginations serve a curious and contradictory function: crude and unthinking supporters of a geocentric system, and fearful of the very notion of a mobile earth, they also form an embarrassing vanguard of proponents of a plurality of worlds. They do so both because everything in their own humble experience militates against a belief that the entire universe exists for the sole benefit of the earth alone, and, more alarmingly, because they are attracted to the mere hypothesis of societies where those who are old, female, poor, and ignorant are not necessarily the emblem of powerlessness. The Rancid Nursery Rhymes of Toothless Old Hags For the patristic writers, old wives’ tales were associated with the various pagan myths and hermeneutic practices against which the early church so often defined itself. In the second century a.d., for example, Irenaeus accused the heretical Valentinians of cobbling together old wives’ tales in order to accommodate the divine word to their own myths. 7 His younger contemporary Tertullian conflated Gnostic texts and the aniles fabulae in similar fashion: describing...