The Sky in Early Modern English Literature A Study of Allusions to C
When a dissertation gets completed, the normal rule is that it is never read. By anyone. David H. Levy’s dissertation - The Sky in Early Modern English Literature: A Study of Allusions to Celestial Events in Elizabethan and Jacobean Writi
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David H. Levy
The Sky in Early Modern English Literature A Study of Allusions to Celestial Events in Elizabethan and Jacobean Writing, 1572–1620
David H. Levy Jarnac Observatory, Inc. Vail, AZ USA [email protected]
ISBN 978-1-4419-7813-4 e-ISBN 978-1-4419-7814-1 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7814-1 Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London Library of Congress Control Number: 2011920803 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
For Wendee. May you always reach for the stars with me.
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Abstract
This investigation is a study of allusions to events in the sky in English writing from 1572, the year of Tycho Brahe’s great supernova, to a time shortly after the first use of the telescope in astronomy in 1610. It is a period during which specific phenomena of the night sky increasingly appear in early modern English Literature. Although much has been written about the changing cosmic philosophies of the time, I will explore a different line of inquiry – a selection of actual events in the sky as they appear in the literature of the time. I emphasize a selection of events, like new stars or supernovae, comets, meteors, and eclipses, which took place between the autumn of 1572, when the first “blazing starre” in over 500 years dominated the night sky, and Galileo’s discoveries with his telescope in 1610. I chose this period because it offered an unusually large number of such events, specifically two supernovae within our home galaxy and 20 comets, whereas during the last 30 years of our own time – a more typical period – there were seven comets and no supernovae within our galaxy. These unusual events are referred to amid a rich background of allusions to more common events like sunrises, sunsets, and meteors. I will approach this topic by selecting passages in works of literature that might correspond to specific events. This study will take advantage of recent technological advances that have given us a much clearer understanding of what events actually took place in the sky and how they were exploited by contemporary authors. Computer programs have recently become quite sophisticated in taking us back into time to show us the positions and magnitudes of supernovae, the path
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