The last gasps of the sixteenth century and the first breaths of the seventeenth brought an explosion in the scientific observation and subsequent discoveries of the heavens. In 1609, the Englishman Thomas Harriot became the first man to map the Moon based on observations from a telescope; Galileo Galilei produced his own images of the Moon, along with observations of Jupiter and the stars, only a few months later in his small book Sidereus Nuncius. This seems to have touched off an astronomical arms race of sorts, and Harriot produced at least twenty new drawings of the Earth's largest satellite over the summer of 1610. While Harriot and Galileo were observing the Moon's topographic features, Johannes Kepler had established the laws of planetary motion, the first of which being that the planets moved in an elliptical rather than a circular orbit. And later on in the century, Christiaan Huygens correctly argued in Systema Saturnium (1659) that Saturn was encircled by "a thin, flat ring, nowhere touching," solving a mystery that had vexed Galileo throughout his remaining years.
The era's most famous and best-surviving discoveries in the cultural memory, however, were those of Galileo himself. Sidereus Nuncius engendered both satirical and serious responses to the Italian astronomer's observations; the aim of this essay, then, is to briefly explore those literary responses to the Moon discoveries in Galileo's tome and the people who created them. I suggest that all of these pieces attempted in some way to deal with the philosophical implications of Galileo's lunar discoveries. As innumerable scholars have noted, the seventeenth century in Europe was so exciting (and unstable) largely because of these scientific discoveries.
[...] Re-presenting Galileo: Creative responses to Sidereus Nuncius in the seventeenth century The last gasps of the sixteenth century and the first breaths of the seventeenth brought an explosion in the scientific observation and subsequent discoveries of the heavens. In 1609, the Englishman Thomas Harriot became the first man to map the Moon based on observations from a telescope; Galileo Galilei produced his own images of the Moon, along with observations of Jupiter and the stars, only a few months later in his small book Sidereus Nuncius.[1] This seems to have touched off an astronomical arms race of sorts, and Harriot produced at least twenty new drawings of the Earth's largest satellite over the summer of 1610.[2] While Harriot and Galileo were observing the Moon's topographic features, Johannes Kepler had established the laws of planetary motion, the first of which being that the planets moved in an elliptical rather than a circular orbit.[3] And later on in the century, Christiaan Huygens correctly argued in Systema Saturnium (1659) that Saturn was encircled by “a thin, flat ring, nowhere touching,” solving a mystery that had vexed Galileo throughout his remaining years.[4] The era's most famous and best-surviving discoveries in the cultural memory, however, were those of Galileo himself. [...]
[...] The Emperor of the Moon. In The Rover and Other Plays. Ed. Jane Spencer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 271-335. Donne, John. An Anatomie of the World, the First Anniversarie. London, 1612. --. Ignatius His Conclave. Ed. T.S. Healy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. Evans, Arthur B. “The Origins of Science Fiction Criticism: From Kepler to Wells.” Science Fiction Studies 26 (1999): 163-186. Galilei, Galileo. Sidereus Nuncius or The Sidereal Messenger. Edited by Albert Van Helden. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989. Godwin, Bishop Francis. [...]
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