Cosmographical

[Chanelle Glugla]

Anexploration of the contribution of dialectic (the art of arguing and reasoning), in its scholastic and humanist guises, to the debates surrounding novelties in cosmology and cosmography in early modern France.

Focusing both on major figures such as Montaigne or Descartes, as well as on now-forgotten popularizers such as Belleforest and Binet, this book describes the deployment of dialectic as a means of articulating and disseminating, but also of containing, the disturbance generated by cosmological and cosmographical novelties in Renaissance France, whether for the lay reader in Court or Parliament, for the parishioner at Church, or for the student in the classroom.

An exemplary map of the cosmographical globe. The two hemispheres are mapped with the equatorial-aspect stereographic projection, as used for star charts, although the map does not feature the line of the ecliptic. Across the lower register are allegories of the four seasons (caused by the earth-sun geometry); across the upper are the planets, represented by the Roman gods, and their orbits around the sun, with a double orbit shown for the earth. This standard division of the hemispheres neatly divided the world into the old and the new worlds.

which clearly teaches (insofar as sensible matter can take it) how to make an artificial sphere. Artisans in our time who wish to fashion figures with a lathe in metal or another material should find its use worth its weight in gold. So, having taken a compass of thin steel or iron, a semicircle is inscribed on some line which is then cut out from the arc to the diameter, and moreover the diameter in between as well; then it is fit for cutting and dividing, and you have a tool very much suited for turning a sphere, just as a compass is for turning circles.Footnote 1

The example of turning a sphere on a lathe makes a point about the status of astronomy, a classic example of a mixed science. The compass, a paradigmatic instrument of geometry, embeds the description firmly within the objects of mathematical study: lines and curves. At the same time, Lefvre sets before his readers a concrete example, a lathe with a semi-circular blade (Fig. 2.1). A compass inscribes the edge of a tool, cutting the curve into the surface of a metallic chunk.

Taken together with the tables and cosmographical tools discussed earlier in this chapter, the example of the lathe suggests the multiple trajectories that could meet within a capacious and growing genre such as the Sphaera. First, the Textus de sphera, first printed in 1495, presented techniques for calculation that became more widespread in books on the Sphaera during the course of the sixteenth century. Lefvre offered commentary on literary and terminological questions, offering the kind of qualitative mastery of the science of the stars that any university educated man was expected to have in the Renaissance. As I show elsewhere, this skill set can be traced through later versions of the Sphaera, and constitutes an important shift in the wider cultural expectation of early modern Europe that educated people should be literate in the arts of number as well as the alphabet (Oosterhoff 2020).

A study considering the range of concerns implicit in the lathe as a commonplace would include reflection on movement within mathematical argument, e.g. (Axworthy 2017, 2018). On the epistemic status of armillary spheres and globes, see (Mosley 2006a, b).

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This wonderful series of medieval cosmographic diagrams and schemas are sourced from a late 12th-century manuscript created in England. Coming to only nine folios, the manuscript is essentially a scientific textbook for monks, bringing together cosmographical knowledge from a range of early Christian writers such as Bede and Isodere, who themselves based their ideas on such classical sources as Pliny the Elder, though adapting them for their new Christian context. As for the intriguing diagrams themselves, The Walters Art Museum, which holds the manuscript and offers up excellent commentary on its contents, provides the following description:

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The continued usage of the standard Lambda Cold Dark Matter (Lambda CDM) cosmological model has been challenged within astrophysics due to its inability to quantify and explain the density and behavior of dark energy, the substance hypothesized to drive universal acceleration. Measurements of the jerk, or change in acceleration, of the universe, which Lambda CDM predicts to be equal to one, have been done in past studies through datasets of Type Ia supernovae with the intention of testing the validity of Lambda CDM, but have yielded inconclusive results. This study aimed to retest Lambda CDM by measuring cosmic jerk using the recently created Pantheon+ supernova dataset, containing the largest number of supernovae (1701) and range of redshift values to date, in hopes of finding updated, precise values to determine possible deviations from Lambda CDM cosmographically without the assumption of any specific model. Jerk values calculated from least squares regression fits to redshift versus distance plots for luminosity and angular diameter distances and four different fitting equation degrees found a trend towards disagreement with Lambda CDM, with the new jerk values mostly measured to be at least one standard deviation away from one, unlike in past studies with older datasets, suggesting increasing disagreement with Lambda CDM with higher quality data. Measurements of the Hubble constant and the w0 equation of state parameter also trended towards disagreement with accepted Lambda CDM values. Additional Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulations done to search for alternate cosmological models with an ideal fit to redshift versus distance produced jerk values with negligible differences to those from Pantheon+, demonstrating the resiliency of the randomized stretch and color parameters in the simulation. Further research with other astronomical objects, such as galaxies, is recommended to test for potential replication of the observed trends.

We regret to inform any users of the site that this resource is no longer available. The site has been withdrawn from public use as it had reached end-of-life. The manuscript images should shortly be available through the Digital Bodleian site and we are hoping to provide transcriptions of the material as soon as is feasible.

In June 2002, the Bodleian Library acquired an illustrated manuscript of a hitherto unknown Arabic cosmographical treatise, the يKitāb Gharāʾib al-funūn wa-mulaḥ al-ʿuyūn, known as the Book of Curiosities. The manuscript is a copy, probably made in Egypt in the late 12th or early 13th century, of an anonymous work compiled in the first half of the 11th century in Egypt. The treatise is extraordinarily important for the history of science, especially for astronomy and cartography, and contains an unparalleled series of diagrams of the heavens and maps of the earth.

The acquisition of the Book of Curiosities was made possible by a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and generous donations from the National Arts Collections Fund, the Friends of the Bodleian, Saudi Aramco, several Oxford colleges, and private individuals.

These grants and donations, along with the Arts & Humanities Research Council, have also funded the project to prepare a full study of the treatise, including an edition of the Arabic text and English translation, and to disseminate the results as widely as possible through the internet, exhibitions, and an outreach programme.

This is the site of that research. It contains an electronic high-quality reproduction of the original text and its illustrations, linked by mouse-overs to a modern Arabic edition and an English translation.

When citing this electronic resource in academic publications, please use the following citation: Emilie Savage-Smith and Yossef Rapoport (eds.), The Book of Curiosities: A critical edition. World-Wide-Web publication. (www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/bookofcuriosities) (March 2007).

Created in England in the late twelfth century, this manuscript was intended to be a scientific textbook for monks. The manuscript is brief at nine folios, and was designed as a compendium of cosmographical knowledge drawn from early Christian writers such as Bede and Isidore, as well as the later Abbo of Fleury. Those writers, in turn, drew on classical sources such as Pliny the Elder for their knowledge but adapted it to be understood through the filter of Christianity. The twenty complex diagrams that accompany the texts in this pamphlet help illustrate them, and include visualizations of the heavens and earth, seasons, winds, tides, and the zodiac, as well as demonstrations of how these things relate to man. Most of the diagrams are rotae, or wheel-shaped schemata, favored throughout the Middle Ages for the presentation of scientific and cosmological ideas because they organized complex information in a clear, orderly fashion, making this material easier to apprehend, learn, and remember. Moreover, the circle, considered the most perfect shape and a symbol of God, was seen as conveying the cyclical nature of time and the Creation as well as the logic, order, and harmony of the created universe. England is especially notable for the production of illustrated scientific textbooks, with the earliest examples produced during the Carolingian period under the influence of the noted Benedictine scholar Abbo of Fleury, who taught at Ramsey Abbey for two years. Although the grouping of texts and diagrams here is unique, the manuscript is related to other scientific compilations from this era, such as British Library, Royal Ms. 13 A.XI, Cotton Ms. Tiberius E.IV, and Oxford, St. John's College, Ms. 17.

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