Abstract
Michael Hoskin, who founded this journal and edited it for 45 years, died at his home in Cambridge, England, on December 5, 2021. Some years ago, Michael, wanting to lighten our load on that day in the future when we would eventually lose him, and wanting, too, for things to be set down correctly in his beloved journal, sent us notes for his own obituary. We have drawn upon them substantially but have added to them.
Michael Hoskin was born in south London on February 27, 1930, the only child of a tax official and a schoolteacher. He attended a Catholic grammar school in west London, surviving first the bombs of the blitz and later the flying bombs and rockets. The school focused on the Classics and so Hoskin spent his last two years there exclusively in the study of Latin and Greek.
After leaving school he was for 5 years a student at London University, earning a BA and MA in pure mathematics. In 1952 he transferred to Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he wrote his doctoral thesis in algebraic geometry. He then spent a year in military research before returning to Cambridge in 1956 as Research Fellow at Jesus College. In the same year he married Jean Margaret (Jane) Small, with whom he was to have five children.
The award of the Fellowship should have reassured Hoskin of his abilities as a pure mathematician, but he was unable to throw off his sense of inferiority to his sole fellow doctoral-student, one Michael Atiyah. Atiyah’s recent obituarist has described him as England’s finest mathematician since Newton, but no one warned Hoskin that Atiyah was out of the ordinary. Taking therefore a gloomy view of his own mathematical ability, Hoskin began to cast around for a career outside mathematics. He chanced upon an advertisement from Leicester University for an inaugural lectureship in a subject called history of science. Although the rival candidates each had a PhD in history of science, it was Hoskin who was appointed. A frantic 3 months of preparation for his lectures were to follow.
Two years later, Rupert Hall suddenly resigned his lectureship in history of science in Cambridge. Hoskin applied and, although there was a distinguished field, he was appointed. He was to spend the rest of his career in Cambridge. At first his only colleague was a philosopher of science and they taught a joint course, with Hoskin single-handedly covering the whole of the history of science and medicine. Furthermore, on arrival in Cambridge he had been asked by the philosopher Richard Braithwaite to take over supervision of a doctoral student named Derek T. Whiteside, who was working in 17th-century mathematics. After Whiteside completed his dissertation he then proposed a publishing project of the first magnitude, a multi-volume edition of Newton’s mathematical papers. Cambridge University Press agreed to take the project on, but only if Hoskin would guarantee it by being formally involved in seeing the work through the press. The resultant eight huge volumes took fourteen years to appear, the first two carrying the notice, “edited by D.T. Whiteside with the assistance in publication of M.A Hoskin.” For volumes 3–6, Whiteside and Hoskin also had the help of Adolf Prag, who then went on to work alone with Whiteside for volumes 7 and 8. Whiteside was a genius of unique ability and The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton was a signal contribution to our field, but Hoskin ever after believed that his own career suffered from the distraction.
Meanwhile history and philosophy of science was expanding in the University, and the number of staff increased and together they were formalized into the department we know today. This allowed Hoskin to concentrate on a field where his mathematics was an asset and his ignorance of science less a disadvantage, namely astronomy before astrophysics. He specialized in the Herschel family, on whom he was eventually to write no fewer than eight books, beginning with William Herschel: Pioneer of Sidereal Astronomy (1959). The final volume, William and Caroline Herschel: Pioneers in Late 18th-Century Astronomy, appeared in the series “Springer Briefs in Astronomy” in 2014.
In 1969 a London publisher asked Hoskin whether there was an area of history of science not yet catered for in the literature, and this led to the founding of the Journal for the History of Astronomy, which published its first issue in 1970 and which Hoskin was to edit for 45 years. In 1962, he had founded the more general History of Science, which he co-edited for a decade with A. C. Crombie. In its early days, History of Science was an annual that emphasized critical reviews of whole fields of scholarship. But in 1973 it became a more conventional quarterly. Both journals were originally published by other concerns, but fell on hard times. Both were acquired and saved by the Hoskin family business, Science History Publications, Ltd., founded in 1971, because, “the rent for a kitchen table is lower than for a West End office.” 1 Owen Gingerich joined Hoskin as reviews editor of JHA in 1973 and continued in this post through 2007. Michael edited JHA through 2014, ably assisted by his son and colleague, Bernard Hoskin, who was responsible for the production side.
Michael also organized an effort to produce a multi-volume General History of Astronomy, to be published under the joint auspices of the International Astronomical Union and the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science. Three volumes appeared between 1984 and 1995. His highly regarded Cambridge Illustrated History of Astronomy was published in 1997, with a Chinese edition in 2003.
In Cambridge most University Lecturers are also Fellow of one of the (autonomous) colleges, and in 1965 Hoskin joined St. Edmund’s House, newly established as a small, experimental community for graduates. For 4 years he served as Vice-Master and Tutor, and later became Secretary of the (outside) board of trustees. As such he oversaw the transfer of ownership of the property from the trustees to the Master and Fellows, which paved the way for St. Edmund’s to become the full College of the University that it is today.
In 1969 Hoskin was invited by Churchill College, Cambridge to join the Fellowship and plan and oversee the construction of an archives center to house the papers of Sir Winston Churchill and his contemporaries. The building was opened in 1973 and is today one of the major British centers for historical research. Hoskin retired from the center on becoming a Head of Department in the University, but remained a Fellow of Churchill for life.
The early years of JHA coincided with a period of intense interest in the possibility of there having been a true science of astronomy in Britain in prehistoric times. A leading figure in these debates was Alexander Thom, an Oxford engineer. Thom was expert in measuring sites, but less at home when arguing his case. A partnership developed as a result of which some twenty JHA papers by Thom were largely ghost-written by Hoskin.
This had two consequences for Hoskin. First, in 1981, as President of Commission 41 of the IAU, Hoskin organized an archaeoastronomy meeting in Oxford, conveniently near to Stonehenge. The meeting proved so successful that regular “Oxford” meetings have been taking place ever since, and the International Society for Archaeoastronomy and Astronomy in Culture exists to manage them.
The second consequence arose from Hoskin’s custom of taking vacations in the Balearic Islands. He found that certain limestone caves had been used for Bronze Age burials. This led him to make contact with local archaeologists, one of whom invited him to visit the mainland and survey two sites where there were numerous Neolithic dolmens. One site consisted of “beehive” tombs, built with large numbers of small stones. Surprisingly, Hoskin found that almost all the tombs faced within the range of sunrise. The second site consisted of megalithic tombs, built, in contrast, with small numbers of large stones. Yet, amazingly, the custom of orientation was identical. Why might this be, and what customs applied elsewhere? Hoskin’s early retirement from the University in 1988 gave him leisure for a prodigious amount of archaeological fieldwork that took him from Ireland to France, Spain, Portugal, and throughout the Mediterranean and North Africa. This culminated in Tombs, Temples and Their Orientations (2001, 2020), which has a corpus mensurarum of some 3000 tombs.
Only Hoskin had personally inspected dolmens in such numbers, and this soon proved useful. At Antequera in southern Spain there are three enormous dolmens, and the authorities enlisted Hoskin’s help in their application for World Heritage Status. Drawing on his 3000 tombs, Hoskin was able to argue that one of the three was probably unique in facing a mountain rather than something in the sky. The Status was granted, and Hoskin’s contribution seems to have played a significant role. In recognition of his contributions to Iberian archaeoastronomy, Hoskin in 2015 was awarded the Medalla de Oro al Mérito en las Bellas Artes by the King of Spain. In Antequera itself is a square named Mirador Michael Hoskin (See Figure 1).
The Mirador Michael Hoskin in Antequera, Spain, with a bust of Hoskin gazing at the mountain known as Peña de los Enamorados.
Hoskin himself, however, always considered his work on Newton’s cosmology as his most important scholarly contribution. Published in this journal in 1977, Hoskin’s “Newton, Providence and the Universe of Stars” examines Newton’s struggle to explain, in the years between the first and second editions of the Principia, why the universe of stars does not collapse under the influence of universal gravitation. Boyle, Bentley, Gregory, Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz, Samuel Clarke, and other contemporaries had, with Newton, much worried themselves about God’s role as Sustainer and/or Creator of a mechanical cosmos with apparently fixed stars. Hoskin was the first to analyze Newton’s unpublished notes on stellar magnitudes, sizes and distributions in space, emphasizing his subject’s “awkward” arguments and his “surprising” failure to arrive at, within his conception of stellar distribution, Olber’s paradox. Since 1977, Newton’s views of providence have become a major theme in scholarship on “science and religion.”
Jane Hoskin died in 2013. Thereafter Hoskin shared his home with a family of nurses who cared for him in his final years.
Michael Hoskin played a major role in the emergence of history of astronomy and archaeoastronomy as a coherent field within broader historical and cultural studies of science. He founded the first specialized journal of the field, organized its first multi-authored textbook, guided graduate students at Cambridge, and made history interesting for the professional scientists of the IAU. Indeed, in 2001 to commemorate his work the IAU named a minor planet (JPL 12223) “Hoskin.”