In the Middle Ages and early modernity, celestial observation was frequently a subject for verbal rather than numerical and geometrical recording. These records can now be difficult to decode, since what they address is frequently obscured by formal conventions of genre, imagery, rhetoric, prosody, to name but a few. The volume collects essays exploring such configurations between literature and observation from Europe to China.

How, contributors ask, were verbal representations of celestial phenomena encoded and self-consciously placed vis-à-vis other systems of representation and knowledge? What kinds of data are represented, and what are the modes in which they are communicated? What interpretational problems arise when present-day disciplines like climatology, meteorology, geophysics, and astronomy, but also literary studies, try to access them? How were discourses on religion, law, anthropology, aesthetics, colonialism etc. linked, in and through their verbal presentation, with astronomical observation and knowledge? How did individual scholars, texts, and concepts travel between European and non-European cultures, both in space and in time, and which constructions of self and other arose in the process?

Contents

Introduction: Writing the Heavens – Aura Heydenreich, Florian Klaeger, Klaus Mecke, Dirk Vanderbeke, Jörn Wilms

Mirari faciunt magis hec quam scire: Ways of (Not) Understanding the Cosmos in Johannes de Hauvilla’s Architrenius – Maximilian Wick

Between Nigromancy and Erudite Meisterschaft: Astronomical Cosmological Knowledge in Middle High German Sangspruchdichtung – Sophie Knapp

Astronomical (In)accuracy in Heinrich von Mügeln’s Der Meide Kranz – Walker Horsfall

The Astronomical Treatise Von den 11 Himmelssphären and Its Relation to the Iatromathematisches Hausbuch – Daniel Könitz

Heavenly Theater: Writing about Astronomy and Astrology in Jean Bodin’s Démonomanie des sorciers – Helge Perplies

Astronomy for the Public – Agata Starownik

Anatomical Descriptions in Star Catalogues: Ptolemy, Brahe, Halley, and Hevelius – Gábor Kutrovátz

Imagining the Extra-Terrestrial ‘Other’ in Early Modern Literature – Hania Siebenpfeiffer

Celestial Education – Alexander Honold

The End of ‘Heavenly Writing’, or: Speech of the Dead Christ down from the Universe That There Is No God (1796) – Reto Rössler

Chinese Heavens in European Literatures, c. 1650–1700 – Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh

“Heavenly Patterns” and Everyday Life in a Nutshell: Astronomy in Pre-Modern Chinese Handy Encyclopaedias – Andrea Bréard

List of Contributors

Index of Names

Source: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111610863/html