Miguel Angel Granada (ed.), Novas y cometas entre 1572 y 1618. Revolución cosmológica y renovación politica y religiosa(Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 2012).
Reviewed for Isis
Steven Vanden Broecke (Ghent University)
Can nature stimulate revolutions in human opinion? Among historians of early modern science, the period 1572-1618 has long been associated with this tantalizing possibility.Beginning with a temporary new star in Cassiopeia in 1572, this era witnessed a profusion of celestial oddities whose rapid succession shook the credibility of bookish spokesmen for nature, as well as traditional certainties and beliefs in natural philosophy and cosmology. This episode is standard fare in most textbooks on early modern science, and much new research has been devoted to it since the 1970s. This has led to serious qualifications of the 'humiliation' of traditional natural philosophy by its supposed inability to integrate and account for the celestial oddities. The early modern cosmological debate has also been firmly anchored in human as well as natural realities, thus allowing for a much stronger focus on the socio-cultural and political motivations driving it. Finally, recent research has also sought to integrate the equally pervasive theological and astrological readings of new stars and comets. This collection of essays, coming out of a conference held in Barcelona in October 2010, is a fine showcase for each of these innovative approaches, and is a truly international effort: four essays are in Spanish, three in English, two in French, and one in Italian.
Victor Navarro Brotóns provides a timely overview of the Spanish literature between the new star of 1572 and the comets of 1618. Dario Tessicini and Miguel Granada both focus on the new star of 1572. Tessicinidetails the Italian debate, while his teacher Granada focuses on the French case through an anonymous Parisian treatise which only came out in 1590. Tessicini's important contribution focuses on the cosmological and physical debate surrounding the nova, and nicely exemplifies the importance which recent research has given to the phenomenon of Aristotelian appropriation.Granada, on the other hand, privileges the contemporary re-use of these noveltiesas points d'appui for voicing political and eschatological expectations and fears in political pamphlets.
Moving towards the comets of 1618, Luís Miguel Carolino shows how the revival of Stoic natural philosophy not only shaped the celestial novelties debate in the Netherlands, as Tabitta van Nouhuys showed on the basis of an original suggestion by Peter Barker in 1998; it also played a substantial role in the seemingly peripheral environment of Portugal. Edouard Mehl focuses on the way in which comets contributed to the demise of celestial circular motion between Kepler and Descartes. Antonio Beltrán Marí revisits the debate, also occasioned by the 1618 comets, between the Jesuit Orazio Grassi and Galileo Galilei (whose key contributions he has now translated into modern Spanish).
Other contributions focus on the alternative philosophical and theological environments in which celestial oddities came to circulate. In her contribution on Blaise de Vigenère's comet treatise of 1577/8, Isabelle Pantin nicely illustrates the pervasiveness of astrological and theological readings of comets, especially at court, but also provides us with important new insights into the latitude of Renaissance interpretations of the 'immutability' of the heavens (p. 112) and the importance of alchemy as a unifying metaphor for the sub- and superlunary realms. Continuing his important research on Kepler's natural philosophy, Patrick Boner focuses on Kepler's treatise on the 1604nova: this is gradually being rediscovered as a key moment in Kepler's development as an astronomer and a philosopher, showing how Kepler's early predilection for spiritual and vitalistic physical principles remained firmly in place after the supposed revolution of his New Astronomy (1609). Carlos Gilly, meanwhile, shows how the new stars played a key role in the contemporary German Rosicrucian and theosophical movements, thus shedding important new light on their specific spiritual uptake of the visible heavens.
Robert Westman's essay focuses on the formidable baroque enterprise of assembling and weighing available reports on these celestial oddities, as evidenced inAlmagestum novum (1651)by the Jesuit Giovanni Battista Riccioli. Westman nicely lays out the delicate interplay between print culture, astronomical method, and community formation in the process of regularizing celestial oddities and drawing them into the disciplinary ambit of theoretical astronomy. Moving beyond his The Copernican Question (2011), Westman provides important insight into Riccioli's fascinating criteria for judging claims about the heavens.
Unlike many other edited volumes, this one breaks crucial new ground through its openness to the many spheres where monsters and oddities had an impact in the early modern period. In doing so, it simultaneously provides acompelling case for the ongoing relevance of the history of astronomy for the history of early modern science at large. Highly recommended reading.