Abstract
Comets were an important object of cosmological debate between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, with varied and changing views until the end of the seventeenth century, when Newton and Halley found an explanation for them within the framework of the new celestial mechanics that came to end the so-called ‘Scientific Revolution’ and opened a new era in cometary theory. Throughout these three centuries, the literature on comets (phenomena that had served since Antiquity as a common meeting point between natural philosophy, astrology understood as a discipline that explained celestial causality on the sublunary world, and religion, inasmuch as comets were also viewed as prodigies referring to divine providence) experienced the effects of the invention of print and the expectations and debates prompted by the Protestant Reformation. Thus, it should come as no surprise that since C. D. Hellman’s monograph on the comet of 1577, 1 the last 50 years have witnessed the appearance of important studies on the history of Renaissance cometary theory 2 as well as catalogues of historical comets. 3 To those we may now add the work under review.
This extensive book of nearly 600 pages stems from a doctoral dissertation defended in 2018 at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In it, Anna Jerratsch examines an important sector of the literature on comets published in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the pamphlets (Flugschriften) printed in German that marked the appearance of the great comets. Recalling that the German cultural space lay at the forefront of European astronomy during these centuries and that interest in comets had grown exponentially in connection with astrological and eschatological anxieties associated with the Reformation, we might better appreciate the decisive importance of this literature throughout the debate on comets. Jerratsch’s rough census identifies 630 Flugschriften (half of which have been studied) and shows that the number of publications increased with each new great comet; and the percentage of the publications in German also increased.
The book consists in five parts, the first (pp. 17–116) devoted to important methodological issues and to establishing the necessarily interdisciplinary character of the study. Until the middle of the seventeenth century, comets were explained in the framework of an ‘augmented theory’ in which the meteorological theory of Aristotle was integrated with astrology to establish a causal explanation of the generation and effects of comets. At the same time – especially in the Protestant context of Melanchthon’s ‘theologized philosophy of nature’ – the theory acquired religious significance, as comets were theologically ‘instrumentalized’ as the expression of God’s wrath against human sin. Astrology, strongly theologized along Melanchthonian lines, acted as the link (Bindeglied) of an ‘integrated theory of comets’ in which the comet was viewed as both cause and sign of effects in the sublunary world that extended from those traditionally assigned to comets (drought, plague, war, death of rulers) to signs of the approaching end of history according to the divine governance of the world.
The second, third and fourth parts constitute the core of the study. In them, Jerratsch carries out a rigorous and comprehensive analysis of ‘case studies’, that is, of Flugschriften by authors (from the natural-philosophical, astronomical, astrological, and theological fields) who participated in the study of the great comets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The second part (pp. 117–178) analyses comets of the years 1530 and 1550, examining, among others, the pamphlets of Petrus Apianus, Johannes Schöner, Paracelsus, and Paulus Fabricius. The third part (pp. 179–320) focuses on the comet of 1577 through the analysis of a varied spectrum of booklets in which features of the ‘augmented theory’ prevail. The fourth part (pp. 321–490) concentrates on comets of the seventeenth century and the study of significant authors and works concerning the comet of year 1618 (especially interesting is the study of the two Flugschriften by Peter Crüger, particularly the Uranodromus cometicus and his polemic with the philosopher and theologian Bartholomaeus Keckermann), the comets of the 1660s (which gave birth to the Tractatus cometicus by Stanislaw Lubienietzki) and the comet of 1680. The pamphlets concerning the latter comet (by Georg Samuel Dörffel and Gottfried Kirch, the so-called ‘second Ulm dispute’ that followed one stimulated by the comet of 1618) already show the disintegration of the ‘integrated theory of comets’ (previously initiated in the works of the 1660s) as a consequence of the crisis of the theoretical legitimation of astrology and the growing discredit of this discipline that had acted as a link or cohesive element in the ‘integrated theory’. If the earlier Flugschriften as a literary genre covered different aspects (natural-philosophical, astrological, astronomical, and theological) with greater emphasis on those related to the profession and particular concerns of given authors, the pamphlets on the comet of 1680 reveal a greater focus on audience and the differentiation of strata of culture (philosophers and savants who wrote for their peers in new communicative media or to free the ‘public’ from superstitious beliefs). These later editions also reflect a growing disintegration of the ‘integrated theory’ that had generated a cultural object shared by the whole of the society and for which the Flugschriften served as a discursive genre. Thus, the abrupt disappearance of the cometary Flugschrift after 1700, when cometary phenomena witnessed a widening variety of expressive forms and a plurality of approaches and interests.
The book closes with a fifth part (pp. 493–529) of conclusions and a rich bibliography (pp. 530–580), especially valuable for its primary sources, which the author skillfully identifies by indicating their registration in the general bibliographical repertoires VD 16 and VD 17 (where the interested reader may find rapid access to digitalized reproductions). In sum, this is a fundamental and already indispensable work for all interested in the transformation of social and scientific representation of comets in the framework of the cultural and scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is also worth saying that the reading of the nearly 600 pages of this study is alleviated and facilitated by its clear and transparent German. The only regrettable oversight is the absence of an index of names.