Comets, Popular Culture, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology

By Sara Schechner

In a lively investigation into the boundaries between popular culture and early-modern science, Sara Schechner presents a case study that challenges the view that rationalism was at odds with popular belief in the development of scientific theories. Schechner Genuth delineates the evolution of people's understanding of comets, showing that until the seventeenth century, all members of society dreaded comets as heaven-sent portents of plague, flood, civil disorder, and other calamities. Although these beliefs became spurned as "vulgar superstitions" by the elite before the end of the century, she shows that they were nonetheless absorbed into the science of Newton and Halley, contributing to their theories in subtle yet profound ways.


Schechner weaves together many strands of thought: views of comets as signs and causes of social and physical changes; vigilance toward monsters and prodigies as indicators of God's will; Christian eschatology; scientific interpretations of Scripture; astrological prognostication and political propaganda; and celestial mechanics and astrophysics. This exploration of the interplay between high and low beliefs about nature leads to the conclusion that popular and long-held views of comets as divine signs were not overturned by astronomical discoveries. Indeed, they became part of the foundation on which modern cosmology was built.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Mar 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9780691227672

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Comets, Popular Culture,

and the Birth of Modern Cosmology

Comets, Popular Culture,

and the Birth of

Modern Cosmology

SARA J. SCHECHNER

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright© 1997 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

Third printing, and first paperback printing, 1999

Paperback ISBN 0-691-00925-2

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows

Schechner, Sara J., 1957-

Comets, popular culture, and the birth of modern cosmology / Sara J. Schechner

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-01150-8 (cloth)

1. Comets. 2. Cosmology. 3. Religion and science. 4. Superstition. I. Title.

QB721.S367 1997

523.6—dc21 96-52186

http://pup.princeton.edu

eISBN: 978-0-691-22767-2

R0

FOR MIRIAM AND NAOMI

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS  xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS  xv

INTRODUCTION

Shared Culture, Separate Spaces  3

High and Low Culture  5

The Verbal and Visual in Popular Culture  10

The Culture of Comets  12

PART ONE: SIGNS OF THE TIMES  15

CHAPTER I

Ancient Signs  17

Physical Theories of Comets  17

Tokens of Doom 20

Political Messages and Means  24

CHAPTER II

Monsters and the Messiah  27

Popular and Patristic Views of Comets  27

Monsters and Their Messages  30

Monstrous Comets in Scripture  31

Star of Bethlehem, Herald of Judgment  38

Time of the End 46

Reformation in Religion  47

CHAPTER III

Divination  51

Color  51

Conjunctions  53

Passage through Zodiac and Prominent Constellations  53

Astrological Houses and Cardinal Orientations 56

Pointing of Tail  58

Position of Nucleus  58

Shapes and Sizes  58

Motion  60

Duration  61

Historical Induction 65

CHAPTER IV

Portents and Politics  66

In Streets and Alehouses  66

God on Their Side  68

Prophecies and Propaganda  70

PART TWO: NATURAL CAUSES  89

CHAPTER V

From Natural Signs to Proximate Causes  91

New Attitudes toward Nature and the Recovery of Classical Science  91

Aristotle and Terrestrial Corruption  92

Ptolemy and the Power of Mars  94

Stepping-Stones from Symptoms to Causes  96

Critics and Strategies  99

CHAPTER VI

The Decline of Cometary Divination  104

Astronomical Reforms  104

Epistemological Critics  114

Shift in Priorities and Signs of Decline  117

Social Reasons for the Decline  123

PART THREE: WORLD REFORMATION  131

CHAPTER VII

Comets, Transmutations, and World Reform in Newton’s Thought  133

Celestial Mechanics of Comets  135

Pristine Truths and Political Corruption  138

Transmutations and Perpetual Interchange  142

Fire, Water, and a Heavenly Physiology  148

Revolutions in the Heavenly Bodies  149

Comets, Teleology, and Newton’s Appropriation of Comet Lore  153

CHAPTER VIII

Halley’s Comet Theory, Noah’s Flood, and the End of the World  156

Interest in Orbits  156

Halley’s Theory of the Deluge  162

The End of the World  164

The Benefits of Comets  166

The Scientific Response  167

Ecclesiastical Criticism  168

Halley’s Alleged Freethinking in Political Context  171

The Satirists’ Barbs  174

PART FOUR: COMET LORE AND COSMOGONY  179

CHAPTER IX

Refueling the Sun and Planets  181

Circulation of Vital Matter  181

Critics  183

Stoking the Stellar Fires  186

CHAPTER X

Revolution and Evolution within the Heavens  188

Come Hell or High Water  189

From Creation to Cosmogony  198

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Popular Culture and Elite Science  216

APPENDIX

Recent Resurgence of Cometary Catastrophism  222

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY  309

INDEX  353

ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1. Broadside showing Halley’s comet over Nuremberg in 1682

Fig. 2. A celestial monster, from Paré’s Des monstres et prodiges (1579).

Fig. 3. Comet of 1577, from a Nuremberg broadside.

Fig. 4. Halley’s comet in 1066, detail from the Bayeux Tapestry.

Fig. 5. Comet of 1314, from Schedel’s Liber cronicarum (1493).

Fig. 6. Prodigious signs, from a London broadside ballad, 1638

Fig. 7. Monstrous child born during the apparition of the 1577 comet, from Bateman’s The Doome warning all men to the Judgemente (1581).

Fig. 8. Heidelberg broadside, 1622

Fig. 9. Sword-shaped comet over Jerusalem (ca. A.D. 66-69), from Bateman’s Doome warning all men (1581).

Fig. 10. Sword-shaped comet over Jerusalem, from Lubieniecki’s Theatrum cometicum (1681).

Fig. 11. Sword-shaped comet over Jerusalem, from Crouch’s Surprizing Miracles (1685).

Fig. 12. Giotto’s Adoration of the Magi, in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua.

Fig. 13. Star of Bethlehem as a comet, from Lubieniecki’s Theatrum cometicum (1681).

Fig. 14. Dürer’s Opening of the Fifth and Sixth Seals, from The Apocalypse (1498).

Fig. 15. The Star Wormwood, described in Rev. 8:10-11, from Gerung’s Apokalypse: Die Vision des 3. Engels (1547).

Fig. 16. The star bearing the key to the bottomless pit, described in Rev. 9:1-3, from Gerung’s Apokalypse: Die Vision des 5. Engels (1547).

Fig. 17. Great conjunction in Pisces, illustrated in Reynmann’s Practica uber die grossen und manigfeltigen Coniunction der Planeten (1524).

Fig. 18. Motion of the comet of December 1618, from Cysat’s Mathemata astronomica de loco, motu, magnitudine, et causis cometae (1619).

Fig. 19. Horoscopes of the 1585 comet drawn up by Tycho Brahe, from his De cometa seu Stella crinita rotunda (1586).

Fig. 20. Comets known as Veru and Venaculus, from an illuminated manuscript, Book of Planets (ca. 1450-1475).

Fig. 21. Comets known as Partica, Miles, and Ascone, from the manuscript Book of Planets (ca. 1450-1475).

Fig. 22. Comets known as Matutina, Argentum, Rosa, and Nigra, from the manuscript Book of Planets (ca. 1450-1475).

Fig. 23. Fifth-century comet, from Schedel’s Buch der Chroniken (1493).

Fig. 24. German broadside showing comet of 1664

Fig. 25. Comets as fiery swords, torches, and brooms, from Mallet’s Description de I’univers (1683).

Fig. 26. Sword-shaped comets, from Hevelius’s Cometographia (1668).

Fig. 27. Realistic comet shapes depicted in Brockhaus’ Conversations-Lexikon (1882-1887).

Fig. 28. God’s Providence, an emblem in Comenius’s Orbis sensualium pictus (1659).

Fig. 29. Patience, an emblem in Comenius’s Orbis sensualium pictus (1659).

Fig. 30. English commemorative medal (1666) connecting comets with London’s fire, plague, and Anglo-Dutch war.

Fig. 31. Death-Clock, from an Augsburg broadside (1683).

Fig. 32. Five comets seen in England, 1664-1682, from Crouch’s Surprizing Miracles (1685).

Fig. 33. Hill’s An Allarm to Europe (1680).

Fig. 34. Ness’s Lord Stafford’s Ghost: Or, A Warning to Traitors, with His Prophesie Concerning the Blazing-Star (1681).

Fig. 35. The 1680-1681 comet hovering over Parliament, from an English broadside ballad.

Fig. 36. Ness’s Signs of the Times (1681).

Fig. 37. Great conjunction and comet, from Ness’s Astrological and Theological Discourse (1682).

Fig. 38. Royalist propaganda concerning a daytime star, from Matthew’s Karolou trismegistou epiphania (1660).

Fig. 39. Astrolabe with comet of 1618.

Fig. 40. Comet tails pointing away from the sun, from Apian’s Practica auffdz. 1532. Jar (1531).

Fig. 41. An eyewitness draws a comet, detail of a Prague broadside, Von einem Schrecklichen und Wunderbarlichen Cometen (1577).

Fig. 42. Debate over cometary paths, from Hevelius’s Cometographia (1668).

Fig. 43. Early telescopic observations of a comet’s nucleus, from Cysat’s Mathemata astronomica de loco, motu, magnitudine, et causis cometae (1619).

Fig. 44. Comet traveling from vortex to vortex, from Descartes’s Le monde (1664).

Fig. 45. Comet egg laid by a Roman hen in 1680, from Madeweis’s broadside, Cometa A[nn]o MDCLXXX et LXXXI (1681).

Fig. 46. Comet egg illustrated in Journal des sçavans (1681).

Fig. 47. The orbit of the 1680 comet, from Newton’s Principia (1687).

Fig. 48. The orbits of five comets, from Bowen’s textbook, A complete system of geography . . . comprehending the history of the universe (1744).

Fig. 49. Cometarium manufactured and sold by London maker Benjamin Martin.

Fig. 50. A comet causes Noah’s Flood, from Whiston’s New Theory of the Earth (1696).

Fig. 51. Bode’s Projection on the Plane of the Ecliptic of the Parabolic Orbits of 72 Comets (1802).

Fig. 52. The formation of the solar system from solar matter sheared off by a sun-grazing comet, from Buffon’s Histoire naturelle (1749).

Fig. 53. Diagram of the orbit of Halley’s comet and its anthropocentric implications, from Scientific American.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

LIKE a tadpole growing into a frog, this book has undergone a number of transformations. My manuscript began life as a Harvard doctoral dissertation. In grateful appreciation for the help I received, I would like foremost to thank my academic advisers, Erwin Hiebert, I. Bernard Cohen, and Owen Gingerich. Their probing questions propelled me along, and to Owen goes the credit of steering my research into the history of astronomy. My training at Harvard and Cambridge in the history and philosophy of science had both breadth and depth, without which the interconnections in this book would not have been possible. I owe thanks to my teachers on both sides of the Atlantic and to my grad-school colleagues, especially Alnoor Dhanani and Elizabeth Knoll.

My manuscript grew legs during a fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago, when I turned my attention to the relationship of high and low culture. This was a wonderful year for me, and I am grateful to my companions-in-research—Kathleen Adams, Jane Tylus, Bill Klein, Julie Solomon, Sue Sheridan Walker, Jan Reiff, Eli Zaretsky, Jim Barrett, Bruce Calder, Fran Dolan, Mary Quinlan-McGrath, and O. C. Edwards—for providing intellectual stimulus and camaraderie.

Other institutions have also been a haven for research. I have benefited from the encouragement and support of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, where I worked as a curator from 1983 until 1990. In recent years, the Committee on the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Maryland at College Park has welcomed me. So has the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics. The rare book library of the Adler Planetarium’s History of Astronomy Department is—thanks to the accessions of Roderick and Marjorie Webster—well stocked with cometary books and ephemera. It was my good fortune to have this library close to hand. Ten other collections provided many resources: Harvard’s Houghton Library, the Special Collections of the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, the Newberry Library, the John Crerar Library, the Print and Drawing Study Room of the Art Institute of Chicago, the New York Public Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, and the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology at the Smithsonian Institution. I must thank the staffs of each of these for their guidance and aid in locating unusual materials.

Three grants assisted my research and writing: The Herbert C. Pollock Award for Research in the History of Astronomy and Astrophysics, bestowed by the Dudley Observatory in Schenectady, New York, 1991-1992; a Newberry Library/ National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 1990-1991; and a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, 1980-1983. I am pleased to acknowledge the generous support of my benefactors and heartily thank them.

Still others have offered encouragement and advice along the way. Betty Krier, Susan Fisher, and Carolyn Robinowitz helped me to keep my balance while grappling with difficult problems. Mordechai Feingold, Ken Howell, Elizabeth Knoll, and Bruce Stephenson read early drafts and kept up my faith. In recent weeks, my daughters, Miriam and Naomi, joined me in gazing at Comet Hyakutake, and over the years they have decorated my office with brightly crayoned photocopies of comet broadsides. My husband, Joel Genuth, humored me in my quest to see Halley’s comet in 1986 (accomplished at 5:00 A.M in the desert south of Santa Fe and north of the state penitentiary!). In fact, he saw it first. That was neither the first nor last odd time or place in which Joel contributed to my work or provided critical support. This book and my outlook on life are the better for his involvement.

Silver Spring, Maryland

June 1996

Comets, Popular Culture,

and the Birth of Modern Cosmology

INTRODUCTION

SHARED CULTURE, SEPARATE SPACES

A CENTURY separated the two statements whose outward contradictions I aim to reconcile in this book. In the first, Edmond Halley celebrated the new outlook engendered by Newton’s masterful treatment of comets in the Principia:

. . . Now we know

The sharply veering ways of comets, once

A source of dread, nor longer do we quail

Beneath appearances of bearded stars.¹

In the second, Thomas Robert Malthus resurrected the very dread of bearded stars to which Halley alluded. Referring to the French Revolution, he wrote:

Like a blazing comet, [it] seems destined either to inspire with fresh life and vigour, or to scorch up and destroy the shrinking inhabitants of the earth.²

Why did Malthus take this backward step? Had not Halley extolled the passing of an era of entrenched superstitions concerning the malevolent effects of comets? By the end of the seventeenth century, astronomers had agreed that comets were members of the solar system; and they had indeed rejected as vulgar the notion that comets were miraculous signs sent by God to sear the hearts of infidels or herald the demise of monarchs. As Halley had understood, the practice of ascribing drought, floods, plague, or revolution to comets had come to be seen as a popular error. In this light, we might be tempted to think that Malthus drew on antiquated notions for rhetorical effect, but in fact, he was thoroughly up-to-date in his characterization of comets. In his day, comets were widely perceived as barges that transported life-sustaining materials to the earth and fuel to the sun. Without the circulation of comets in the heavens, all life would cease. On the other hand, it was also widely believed that comets had key roles to play in the earth’s Creation, Noachian Deluge, and ultimate destruction. The final Conflagration would be ignited by a comet, many exegetes said, and natural philosophers concurred that a blazing star could serve this function by immersing the earth in its fiery tail, by dropping into the sun and causing a solar flare, or by kicking the earth out of its orbit and transforming it into a comet. Forced to travel in a much more elongated circuit around the sun, the old earth would be scorched and frozen in turns; its denizens would discover that they lived in hell! Therefore, widespread endorsement of the new, periodic theory of comets had not mitigated the perception of comets as agents of upheaval or renewal, nor indeed as tools God might use to punish the wicked or save the elect. In fact, the cometary theory to which Malthus alluded was not counter to that of Newton and Halley (as commonly supposed) but derived directly from their studies. There was, it seems, a place for the vulgar in the recondite studies of astronomers.

The nature of this place and how vulgar seeds were sown there are the subjects of this book. My principal aim is not to demarcate the boundaries between so-called superstition and modern astrophysical science, but to break down the traditional intellectual fences of historians of cometary astronomy in order to examine shared discourse. In the pages that follow, I will show that the history of cometary science is a tale not of rigid borders, but of the fluid interplay of high and low beliefs about nature and religion.

When we tear down the fences, we discover that the traditional view of comets as divine signs—found alike in folk beliefs and theological texts—was not overturned by Newton and Halley’s astronomical discoveries (as others have claimed), but was in fact embraced by scientists and used creatively in the development of their cosmological theories. Newton and Halley wished to see God’s providence in nature, and to this end, they redescribed comet lore in natural philosophical terms. Their successors agreed that comets could be agents of world reform, and this hypothesis became a cornerstone of eighteenth-century cosmogonic theories.

The fact that comet lore survived in Newtonian cosmology leads us to reevaluate and challenge the received view that astronomical research and philosophical attacks were sufficient causes of the decline of cometary superstition and the rise of astronomical rationalism during the early modern period. Although these factors played their part, it appears that social factors perhaps played larger roles in influencing people to reject the crudest forms of prognostication, even though many—like Newton and Halley—continued to nurture other tenets of comet lore.

When Newton and Halley incorporated comet lore into their astrophysics, they drew on two principal traditions: one treated comets as signs, the other as causes. Having their roots in antiquity, these traditions evolved over a long period of time, were given voice by authors and artists of many different nationalities, and were heavily imbued with religious and political implications. Although the import ascribed to any given comet varied with the political commitments of the prognosticator, the methods and uses of divination varied little among forecasters. These tenets, methods, and uses of comet lore were funneled into seventeenth-century English works, whose authors frequently cited foreign and classical sources. To illuminate these references, I will trace the evolution of cometary beliefs and practices from antiquity to the early modern era and will draw on diverse Western sources.

In performing this task, I will depart from the trail blazed by other authors, who, for the most part, have either treated folk beliefs anecdotally or recorded them chronologically with minimal historical interpretation. More often than not, they have labeled old views as superstitious and described them with derision as a foil for modern convictions. By contrast, I will not simply catalog comet lore but will also interpret, historicize, and thematically arrange it. I will distinguish between comets as signs and as causes, between local and global spheres of influence, and between religious and political subtexts. I will present new information, as well as a new structure for understanding it, when I treat comets in the context of monsters (and not simply astrology) and inquire into comets as physical agents.

Many learned and folk traditions set the stage for seventeenth-century cometography, and I will paint them in broad brush strokes in the opening, thematic sections of this book. A more detailed picture will be rendered of seventeenth-century customs and of English society in particular in the middle part. Here the intersections of high and low culture will be investigated at length as I examine the social contexts of English cometography and analyze the ways that vulgar comet lore was absorbed into the elite astronomical work of Newton and Halley. Newton’s and Halley’s thoughts on the functions of comets were greeted with enthusiasm by most natural philosophers in England and Europe during the eighteenth century, and their cometography in turn helped to propel the development of modern cosmological thought. To delineate the breadth of their influence and explore what it says about the tenacity of popular motifs, I will revert to a panoramic view in the book’s closing section.

Generalizing about a phenomenon as multifaceted and diffuse as the rise and fall of beliefs in comets as signs and causes is difficult. The upper and lower rungs of society shared many beliefs, but the makeup of these social groups and the degree of their commitment varied with time and place. I will try to specify to whom I am referring at each step in my analysis. Despite the variety of constituents and endorsements, it is still useful to speak in terms of high and low audiences, elite and popular practices, in order to be mindful of the social differences as we study the way folklore and science were amalgamated.

HIGH AND LOW CULTURE

Since what constitutes high and low culture will be a recurrent theme of this book, a few definitions are in order here. By culture, I refer to attitudes and values expressed in performances (such as songs, stories, rituals, and plays) or embodied in artifacts (such as pictures, printed texts, and other material works).³ By common people, I refer to those with little or no schooling who may or may not have been illiterate, to the unlearned in Latin, to those of poor or modest means who could not afford to buy more than a few books, to peasants and artisans. In upper-class parlance, I refer to the vulgar, the multitude, the mob, in contrast to the wealthy nobles and learned scholars who constituted the elite. As a starting point, popular culture may be defined in hierarchical terms as the culture of the subordinate classes. We know that popular culture included folk songs, folk dances, and folktales, devotional images and mystery plays, street literature and chapbooks, sports such as bearbaiting and cockfighting, charivaris, and seasonal festivals. Popular culture embodied social control, as in shaming rituals like ridings and rough music deriding cuckolds beaten by their wives; and it gave voice to social protest or outlet to social tensions, as in Carnival plays that inverted the established social order. It was informally transmitted through oral as well as printed means, and was found in both public spaces (churches, taverns, markets) and more private places (barns, cottages, workshops). Learned culture, on the other hand, was cultivated in schools and universities; it embraced classical and medieval philosophy and the intellectual and artistic movements of the early modern era. Ideas were formally transmitted in Latin and other languages by texts and tutors.⁴

I said as a starting point above, because it is worth emphasizing that in early modern Europe, the two cultural traditions (popular and learned, little and great) did not correspond symmetrically to the practices of the two main social groups (the common and elite). It first appears that learned culture was the restricted province of the educated elite, whereas popular culture was open to all. Artisans did not read Aristotle, but courtiers attended Carnival. During the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the pattern changed. The elite gradually withdrew their participation from what came to be seen as vulgar activities, and engaged in a program to reform the manners of the common folk.⁵

But even this account is hard to sustain fully. A number of scholars in recent years have pointed out just how difficult it is to draw a line between high and low culture in terms of content and consumers.

One problem in identifying popular culture with the activities and artifacts of the subordinate classes is the extent to which these classes interacted with upper-class culture (fig. 1). Menocchio, a sixteenth-century Italian miller, read books and drew his own heretical conclusions from them.⁶ Scattered fragments of ancient medical knowledge and natural history were found in popular thought, having been put into circulation by herbals and emblem books.⁷ Popular forms of cultural expression were prepared not only by the people, but also for the people. The bibliothèque bleue, for example, the cheap booklets peddled to peasants in the French countryside in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, first circulated among the urban bourgeoisie and so were popular not in origin but ultimately in taste.⁸ Some cultural products were shaped from below as well as imposed from above. Peasant lore was collected and published in works such as the Calendrier des bergers, thereby coming to the attention of learned professors like Antoine Mizaud, who decided to correct popular errors and instruct rustic audiences on useful subjects such as weather prediction.⁹ English almanacs also reflected folklore but principally aimed to disseminate more academic views.¹⁰ It is arguable as well that the efforts to reform popular practices and control the people at certain times and places might have been so total that popular culture became the creation of the ruling classes.¹¹

Fig. 1. Broadsides, which catered to the common folk, mingled high and low elements. This broadside shows Halley’s comet as it appeared over the Nuremberg observatory in 1682. The text (not shown) considers what the comet might portend. (WOP-19. Courtesy of Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum, Chicago, Illinois.)

By way of example, let me offer the circumscribed case of English civic pageantry and Lord Mayor’s Shows in mid-seventeenth-century London. These were public spectacles that drew large crowds. In them, a procession made its way through the streets, stopping at one site or monument after another. At each stop, spectators were entertained by a dramatic performance. This was public theater, and its propaganda value was not lost on the government. Consequently, the elite did as much as they could to orchestrate the program and the public’s participation in it. For instance, Charles II was the key actor in his coronation procession on 22 April 1661. As his cavalcade traveled from the Tower to Whitehall, many of his subjects had their first glimpse of the returning monarch ... as he threaded the narrow streets on that bright April morning, the principal character in a pageant whose brilliance outshone all else within living memory.¹² The tableaux in this pageant made court ideology manifest. Peace and prosperity, they declared, were fundamentally linked to the restoration of the monarchy and the return to the old order. Subsequent Lord Mayor’s Day Shows tactfully reinforced this message, but after 1671 when Charles started to attend them regularly, these civic spectacles brazenly propagated the court’s ideology.¹³

The traffic in high and low cultural elements flowed on a two-way street. If the common folk borrowed ideas from the learned, or were induced to accept the cultural hegemony of their social superiors, the elite were not above partaking of the culture of the masses. Bourgeois readers read the same almanacs and chapbooks as did the common people. Folk stories and motifs traveled up the social ladder and can be found embedded in scholarly texts. For example, visions of trips to heaven and hell, recorded in Latin by medieval monks, contained all the elements of folk accounts of journeys to the otherworld (albeit they were couched in a Christian framework).¹⁴ To cite a case more central to this book, Ambroise Paré, the chief surgeon to two kings of France, took note of monsters, which were commonly thought to portend misfortune, and discussed their significance in a surgical work. Along with depictions of Siamese twins and fabulous animals, Paré published an image of a celestial monster, identified as a horrible blood-colored comet . . . that engendered such great terror in the common people that some of them died of fear over it¹⁵ (fig. 2). Such apparitions and wonders appealed to all groups in early modern society; they were interpreted not only in tabloid broadsheets but also in learned sermons, Latin prodigy books, and scientific treatises.

The foregoing examples suggest that popular culture, like elite culture, did not inhere in a specific set of texts, gestures, or beliefs. Here Roger Chartier’s concept of culture as appropriation is helpful. Chartier emphasizes that we must replace the study of cultural sets that were considered as socially pure with another point of view that recognizes each cultural form as a mixture, whose constituent elements meld together indissolubly.¹⁶ Popular did not reside in specific artifacts or performances, but in how ordinary people appropriated and adapted those that interested them. Likewise, elite culture was constituted by the appropriation and alteration of many materials that did not initially belong to the upper crust.¹⁷

Good examples of the borrowing and blending of elements are seen in the case of religion and medicine. In England, the medieval Catholic Church assimilated many Anglo-Saxon folk rituals into authorized religious practice. The ancient worship of wells, for instance, became associated with a saint rather than a heathen spirit. The health-giving properties of a well were ascribed by the medieval church to the intercession of the saint with God, and later by early modern physicians to the medicinal powers of the spring water. Thus a folk belief was accommodated and adapted by different authoritarian segments of society. Lower on the social ladder, prayers were blurred in the popular mind with spells and incantations. Common folk thought that there was power in the mere repetition of holy words, and talismans inscribed with signs of the cross or verses of gospel were worn as preservatives against drowning, death in childbirth, and fever. Although theologians denied that the church could manipulate supernatural powers, at the parochial level many clergy shared the beliefs of their parishioners that holy water, relics, and consecrated wine and bread had the power to heal the sick or perform other magical functions. When Protestant reformers rejected the magical elements they saw in Catholic rites and remedies, folk healers in the Tudor countryside continued the work of parish priests by dispensing holy charms and liturgical spells along with herbal remedies.¹⁸

Fig. 2. A grisly, blood-colored comet included among the celestial monsters discussed by Ambroise Paré in Des monstres et prodiges, 3d ed. (Paris, 1579). (Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine.)

Do the blurry boundaries between popular and learned culture threaten the usefulness of these terms? Not when one considers the act and patterns of consumption that create a cultural product in addition to the content and structure of the product. Popular culture was shared by high and low, but evidence of this overlap should not obscure the distinctions of social space that separated the two groups. Take three examples: festivals, sporting events, and reading matter. In England, patricians and plebeians both attended Bartholomew Fair, May Day celebrations, and Lord Mayor’s Shows in London. But the upper classes watched the Lord Mayor’s Shows from balconies; the blue apron audience frolicked in the streets. The classical iconography of the pageants appealed to the learned, whereas simpler images such as Jack Straw appealed to members of the London trades. Sporting events also cut across but did not level class distinctions. Cockfights for gentlemen and poorer sorts took place on different days. When gentle and simple attended the same cockfight, there was often separate seating.¹⁹ Almanacs were written by the educated for both high and low readers and so formed a bridge between them. Yet people did not always agree with what they read, and engaged at many levels with the texts before them. Chapbooks and broadsides amused upper-class children and sometimes their parents. But perhaps elite adults like Samuel Pepys were slumming when they collected these penny merriments. They were, after all, viewed with curiosity and contempt by Sir William Cornwallis as early as 1600:

Pamphlets, and lying stories and news, and two penny poets I would know them, but beware of being familiar with them: my custom is to read these, and presently to make use of them, for they lie in my privy.²⁰

Being too familiar with popular material might be seen as evidence of having kept bad company, and elite reading matter quickly became déclassé once produced for the mass market. The chivalric romances and lurid tales that had appealed to aristocrats were disparaged as vulgar when coarsely printed in chapbooks.²¹

THE VERBAL AND VISUAL IN POPULAR CULTURE

Before we turn in this book to elements of popular culture that were embedded in elite scientific works, perhaps some justification is required for my heavy reliance on printed sources. Popular culture in early modern Europe was predominantly oral, but various forms of print culture reached segments of the common people nonetheless. The culture of print in France and England has been well studied. Between 1530 and 1660, a popular market for print culture was created in France and England, even though illiteracy remained high and book ownership low among the nonelite. Peddlers carried chapbooks, broadsheets, and prints in their packs. Evangelical Protestants introduced vernacular Bibles, Psalters, and Calvinist literature to the French countryside. With a higher literacy rate than peasants, urban artisans and tradesmen had greater opportunity for direct access to the contents of printed works, but because books were relatively expensive, they often owned just one book at a time. Books circulated, however, being bought, lent, shared, and resold. In France, the most common volumes were books of hours, copies of the Golden Legend, Bibles, breviaries, missals, or technical works, such as a pattern book to be used in the workshop. The common folk in England indulged in the purchase of almanacs and street literature. As already noted, popular readers did not acquire books specific to their class; the same vernacular works were read by notables.²²

The possession and private reading of books does not fully characterize the relationship of popular classes to print culture, however. Books were used collectively in workshops where apprentices and artisans consulted trade manuals and arithmetics, in Protestant assemblies where congregants sang psalms and heard the Scriptures read aloud, and in fraternal organizations where members circulated texts celebrating festive occasions.²³

The oral and the printed interacted to a great degree, for reading was not a silent affair. French peasants might hear someone read aloud or translate a tale from French into the local dialect at a veillée, an evening gathering held especially during the winter months in rural communities.²⁴ Published news stories were talked about in English country alehouses, and broadside ballads were pinned to the back of doors and posted on the walls so that customers might entertain themselves. With pints in hand, farmers sat down with their neighbors to pore over the almanac’s forecasts of weather and politics. In the marketplace, balladeers sang catchy tunes to encourage the sale of the printed sheets, and passersby who learned the words later sang the songs to the spinning wheel or chirped them beneath the cow to help her let down her milk. Political pamphlets were often written to be read aloud. Radicals during the English Revolution arranged for declarations to be announced by the town crier, or to be pinned to the market cross where they were audibly read by bystanders.²⁵

Moreover, one cannot simply divide the world into oral and scribal, listeners and readers. There existed a spectrum of reading abilities between literacy and illiteracy, and a range of printed works that merged words with pictures.²⁶ Woodcuts and engravings were coupled with texts, not only in illustrated books but also in single printed sheets. The latter were designed for private or public use. They were stored in drawers or hung over the kitchen mantel, in the nursery, and on the parlor chimney; others were pasted on walls of the workshop, church, inn, and town.²⁷ Public display meant that the printed works reached audiences who could not read or afford to buy them. Broadsides made fascinating wallpaper, for they contained three elements: a bold title to be announced, a provocative image, and a short, explanatory text in prose or verse dealing with political events, sorcerers’ misdeeds, monstrous births, or celestial wonders such as comets. Visual imagery was a link between print and oral culture.

In general, the impact of printing on people’s lives depended on the literacy of those in their communities; the cost and availability of printed texts in a language that they knew; the existence of social occasions when books could be read aloud or prints examined; the need or wish for information that they thought could be found more readily in printed than in oral sources; and the desire to use the press to tell someone else something. With the help of social networks at work, in the marketplace, in church, or in festive confraternities, the circulation of varied types of printed media—with pictures and texts—made the written word and the ideas it contained familiar to those who could not read.²⁸

It must be noted that the culture of print did not supplant oral and folk art traditions, even though these traditions were sometimes found reflected in printed sources. There was a dynamic relationship between the printed and the oral, the verbal and the visual. Elucidating the oral components of popular culture from the surviving remains of material culture is a risky undertaking and is not the aim of this book.

THE CULTURE OF COMETS

What was the place of comets in popular culture? Setting aside elusive oral traditions, I draw my conclusions from artifacts and recorded performances, artwork and cheap tracts. These include ephemeral publications such as news-sheets, broadsides, almanacs, and chapbooks; ballads, plays, and sermons; paintings, woodcuts, and engravings. Here the feelings of terror and foreboding aroused by comets since antiquity are recalled (fig. 3). In folklore, comets heralded war, famine, plague, ill-luck, the downfall of kings, universal suffering, the end of the world, and yet sometimes good fortune.

High and low audiences shared certain beliefs about comets, and each audience appropriated learned and popular ideas. Stith Thompson’s MotifIndex of Folk-Literature provides a starting point for the identification of popular elements that have appeared in folklore and may sometimes be found in erudite texts. The index contains detailed entries for many of the themes and subjects to be described in this book: the origin and condition of comets, meteors, stars, and planets; divination by means of the heavenly bodies and other celestial apparitions; omens and signs; prodigies; marvels of nature; monsters; world calamities and renewals. The specific entries are too numerous to mention here but will be cited as necessary in subsequent chapters.²⁹

The study of high and low perceptions of comets supports the thesis that when popular and elite culture brushed up against each other, it was not a contact between two juxtaposed and pre-existent worlds (one scholarly, the other popular), but rather an encounter that produced cultural or intellectual ‘alloys,’ the components of which were as solidly bound together as in metal alloys.³⁰ The alloys were always changing. I shall be analyzing their components in order to suggest that new patterns of idea consumption and amalgamation promoted both the decline of the interpretation of comets as portents and the rise of their interpretation as cosmological agents. The decline of prognostication in the seventeenth century was connected in part with the withdrawal of the elite from socially discredited and vulgar practices. The new, natural philosophical interpretation derived from the way Newton and Halley appropriated popular comet lore and melded it into their astrophysical thought.

Fig. 3. Comet of 1577. Nuremberg broadside, detail. (Wickiana Collection. From the Department of Prints and Drawings of the Zentralbibliothek Zurich.)

PART ONE

Signs of the Times

CHAPTER I

Ancient Signs

CHANGES in weather and affairs of state—comets have imported these since ancient times. Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans laid the foundation for early modern ideas on the physical nature of comets, their capacity as portents, and the bearing their physical nature ostensibly had on their purpose. The ancients also provided models for the political use of cometary divination. I shall address these subjects here, reserving the early techniques of prognostication for discussion in chapter 3.¹

PHYSICAL THEORIES OF COMETS

We know little of what people thought about comets before Aristotle, and most of what we know comes secondhand. From cuneiform astronomical tablets, and from works by Aristotle, Diodorus Siculus, Seneca, and one long attributed to Plutarch but now thought to be by Aëtius, we learn that ancient philosophers divided themselves into two main camps.² Some believed comets to be astronomical entities; others affirmed their meteorological nature. For convenience, I have cataloged philosophers according to their stand on this question in tables 1 and 2. The details of their thought, scant as they are, do not concern us here, but the ideas of Aristotle and Seneca, who endorsed opposing viewpoints, deserve a closer look.

Without a doubt, the most influential ancient theory of comets was that of Aristotle. In the Meteorologica, Aristotle judged that comets were sublunar meteors composed of hot, dry windy exhalations. They had two causes. The most common were formed when a condensed mass of volatile exhalations ascended from the earth into the upper atmosphere, where it was ignited by revolutions of the contiguous heavenly sphere. Comets were also formed when a star or planet gathered atmospheric exhalations into a stellar halo that appeared as the comet tail but was not attached to the star or planet. Unlike the first type of comet, which moved more slowly and erratically than the stellar sphere, the second type had the same motion as its generating star.³

Aristotle sorted comets according to their physical shape. When the fiery exhalations extended in all directions, a long-haired star or astēr komētēs (ὰστήρ koήτης) was formed; from this we derive our modern word comet. When the exhalations extended lengthwise, a bearded star (πωγωíας—pogonias) was the result. This nomenclature was employed until the early modern era.⁴

TABLE 1

Classification of Ancient Theories of Comets as Celestial Objects

TABLE 2

Classification of Ancient Theories of Comets as Meteorological Objects

Sources: Aristotle, Seneca, Aëtius.

Theophrastus and Ptolemy were among Aristotle’s more notable followers, but Seneca would have none of it.⁵ I do not think that a comet is just a sudden fire but that it is among the eternal works of nature, he declared.⁶ Unlike fires, comets move, preserve their continuity, and are uniform. . . . A comet has its own position and so is not quickly expelled but measures out its own space. It is not extinguished but simply departs.⁷ Seneca classified comets as mobile heavenly bodies but did not believe them to be planets as some of his predecessors did.⁸ To refute these theories is like exercising by throwing arm-length punches into the wind, he haughtily said.⁹ It mattered not that comets moved outside of the zodiac, because it was more in keeping with the size and beauty of the universe for there to be diversity among the celestial wanderers and the routes in which they traveled.¹⁰ Seneca acknowledged that men did not yet know whether comets ever reappeared according to pattern or sequence, but was inclined to think that they moved in eternal circuits.¹¹ He reminded his critics that nature did not often display comets. Why, then, are we surprised that comets, such a rare spectacle in the universe, are not yet grasped by fixed laws and that their beginning and end are not known, when their return is at vast intervals?

The time will come when diligent research over very long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject. . . . And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendents will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them.¹²

Seneca predicted that some day there will be a man who will show in what regions comets have their orbit, why they travel so remote from other celestial bodies, how large they are and what sort they are.¹³

Seneca’s universe was composed of many discordant yet eternal entities. Nature delighted in diversity and employed comets to lend glory to her works. The appearance of comets is too beautiful for you to consider an accident, whether you examine their size or their brightness, which is greater and more brilliant than the other celestial bodies. In fact, their appearance has a kind of exceptional distinction. They are not bound and confined to a narrow spot but are let loose and freely cover the region of many celestial bodies, Seneca marveled.¹⁴

Such majesty was appropriate to things divine, and Seneca classified comets, stars, and planets among the sacred mysteries to be approached with reverence. In addressing astronomical matters, he said, we ought to draw in our togas modestly as if entering a temple, for in truth we strive to enter the temple of nature. As we examine heavenly matters, we [may] believe that we are her [Nature’s] initiates but we are only hanging around the forecourt, Seneca reminded. Those secrets are not open to all indiscriminately. They are withdrawn and closed up in the inner sanctum. There is much we do not know. Indeed, God has not made all things for man, nor are sacred things revealed all at once. Our universe is a sorry little affair unless it has in it something for every age to investigate.¹⁵

Seneca’s themes of the divine nature of comets and their mysterious purposes were repeated over the succeeding centuries.

TOKENS OF DOOM

What was the meaning of comets in the ancient world, and the natural link, if any, proposed to connect comets and portended events? Aristotle’s and Seneca’s investigations into the physical nature of comets were deeply rooted in each one’s interpretation of their ominous significance. The physical theories of others, however, were oddly independent of their beliefs in the power of these bearded portents.

Aristotle’s physical theory derived from his belief that comets were signs. He reasoned that comets must be fiery meteors because they heralded severe winds, drought, tidal waves, storms, earthquakes, and stones falling from the sky. Like comets, these terrible things appeared only when hot, dry exhalations were plentiful. These exhalations parched the air and disintegrated moist vapors, causing drought and windy weather. Severe winds heaved enormous stones into the air, churned the ocean, and heaped up tidal waves, whereas windy exhalations trapped within the earth rumbled below ground until they were vented in violent earthquakes.¹⁶ Aristotle bolstered his theory with empirical data. The fall of the remarkable stone at Aegospotami in Thrace in 467 B.C. coincided with the apparition of a comet.¹⁷ On the tail of the comet