Volker Remmert. Widmung, Welterklärung und Wissenschaftslegitimierung: Titelbilder und ihreFunktionen in der Wissenschaftlichen Revolution .Widmung, Welterklärung und Wissenschaftslegitimierung: Titelbilder und ihre Funktionenin der Wissenschaftlichen Revolution by Volker RemmertReview by: By Simone   De AngelisIsis, Vol. 99, No. 4 (December 2008), pp. 844-846Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/597709 .

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damaged. Their disappearance is often made tocoincide with the decline of the Roman Empire.Some argued that they still existed but were kepta secret by the more astute members of societyor that they were available only in parts ofEurope remote from the reader. Developmentsin the design of metal and glass mirrors en-hanced the interest in these hyperbolic descrip-tions, but little if anything was achieved. In thethirteenth century “reading stones,” transparentstones that provided slight magnification to thepage beneath them, became common, andshortly thereafter convex lenses were adapted asreading glasses. Concave metallic mirrors weremade in the sixteenth century, but they did littlemore than evoke the dream of telescopic vision.The setups that are suggested, and sometimesactually described, do not seem feasible. Seeingis believing, but it was a long and laborious timebefore seeing became seeing what had neverbeen seen.

The “glassworks” mentioned in the title of thebook do not refer to Galileo’s own workshop inPadua. He did not have to have the facilities tomanufacture lenses, and he purchased his mate-rial from glassmakers in Murano, where the tra-dition of glassblowing thrives to the present day.When he left Padua to return to Florence in1611, Galileo found himself in a serious predic-ament, since he was unable to find the lenses heneeded in Tuscany. He relied on his Venetianfriend Giovanfrancesco Sagredo to send himsome, but the correspondence shows that only asmall number of the lenses ordered were satis-factory. This explains why Galileo was unableto provide several of his wealthy patrons withthe telescopes they so urgently wanted. Seeingwas indeed believing, but one had to see throughthe right sort of glass.

WILLIAM R. SHEA

Volker Remmert. Widmung, Welterklarungund Wissenschaftslegitimierung: Titelbilder undihre Funktionen in der Wissenschaftlichen Rev-olution. (Wolfenbutteler Forschungen, 110.)267 pp., figs., bibl., index. Wiesbaden: Harras-sowitz Verlag in Kommission, 2005.

After abandoning the “grand recits,” scholarsare prolific in rewriting the history of the “sci-entific revolution.” One perspective is to suggestthat there is a link between the legitimation of(traditional) knowledge and its representation in“paratexts” such as the title pages and frontis-pieces of scientific books. At the beginning ofthe seventeenth century, astronomy and othermathematical sciences had to be legitimated

with respect to the traditional canon of disci-plines taught at the universities (e.g., Aristotle’sphilosophia naturalis), and the geocentric worldsystem had to be defended against the theory ofthe earth’s motion. In this context, the paratex-tual elements in the works of Jesuit astrono-mers—from Christoph Clavius to Giovanni Bat-tista Riccioli—display a strategy of visuallegitimation and visual communication whoserole in the scientific revolution, according toVolker Remmert, has been underestimated.Widmung, Welterklarung und Wissenschaftsle-gitimierung presents a detailed analysis of someseventy paratexts from mathematical books, re-constructing the visual messages that authorssought to deliver to a public not exclusivelycomposed of specialists.

In Chapter 2 the author shows that the titlepage of Clavius’s Opera mathematica of 1612 isa neglected source for the Galileo affair of 1616:read according to the Jesuit practices of biblicalexegesis in use before 1610, the title page pre-sents the message that he who champions theearth’s motion opens himself to the charge ofheresy (p. 44). All four of the standard anti-Copernican arguments from the Bible (e.g.,the arrest of the sun at Gibeon [Joshua 10:12–13])—are visualized in Clavius’s paratext (p. 47).But Remmert does not make explicit one impor-tant aspect of this strategy: the practice of makingthe relevance of astronomical matters to questionsof faith visible grew out of the technique of ek-phrasis or demonstratio, which—as Marc Fu-maroli has pointed out in L’age de l’eloquence(3rd ed. [Droz, 2002], p. 677)—was the generativeprinciple of the Jesuit rhetoric of imagination. Ev-idently, Jesuit astronomers adopted this techniquein the construction of their cover pages. It is alsoused to demonstrate “the unity of truth”— theo-logical and astronomical—in the frontispieces ofboth Jesuit works treated in Chapter 3, ChristophScheiner’s Rosa ursina (1630) and Riccioli’s Al-magestum novum (1651). But—as the iconogra-phy and the reception of the frontispieces makeclear—both frontispieces in fact contributed tocreating and consolidating the myth of Galileopropagated by means of the frontispiece of theDialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo of1632 (where Copernicus has the visual features ofGalileo), by the frontispiece of its Latin translationof 1635, and by the frontispiece of the Opere of1655, designed by Stefano della Bella: a strongsymbol of the “new science” was born (p. 100). Itis quite fascinating how Remmert’s explanationsguide the reader’s own exploration of the picturesin his brilliantly designed large-format book.

Scientific books of the seventeenth centurywere not just books; they also served strategies

844 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 99 : 4 (2008)

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of patronage (Ch. 7). Scheiner’s Rosa ursina isan example of the considerable amount of timeand money Jesuits invested in the making oftheir works. The roses and bears (“orsi”) on thetitle page dedicated to Paolo Giordano II Orsini,as well as his blazon in the frontispiece, sym-bolize the favors Scheiner obtained from thisinfluential Roman family, which also supportedhim in the dispute with Galileo about the theoryand the discovery of the sunspots (p. 192).

The visual legitimation of mathematical sci-ences occurred in other contexts as well: forti-fication, navigation, warfare, and trade (Ch. 4).The utility of geometry for war, for example,became a topical argument reproduced in thefrontispiece of Jacques Ozanam’s Dictionairemathematiques of 1691, written in the time ofLouis XIV: the personified Geometria instructsa woman, probably Architectura Militaris or the

war goddess Athena, about a plan of a fortress(pp. 115–116). The new astronomy saw twomain strategies of visual legitimation: the Atlas-Hercules symbolism (Ch. 5) and the construc-tion of an astronomical tradition going back toantiquity (Ch. 6). The title page of JohannesBayer’s Uranometria of 1603 (p. 127) portraysthe mythological hero Hercules with TychoBrahe’s nose, which was copied from the latter’sself-portrait in his Epistolarum astronomicarumlibri of 1596: through his Herculean astronom-ical work the Danish aristocrat Brahe achievedhis apotheosis (pp. 142–143). In the frontispieceof Jan Luyt’s Astronomica institutio of 1692 (p.185), the chronology of the astronomical tradi-tion is overturned in favor of a visualization ofthe author’s own assessment: Jan Hevelius, whoholds a telescope, and Tycho Brahe are placedclosest to Hipparchus, the ancient founder of

Holzschnitt von John Day Coelifer Atlas (from Remmert, Widmung, Welterklarung undWissenschaftslegitimierung).

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astronomy. This scene might have suggested tothe work’s recipients that an end to astronomicalprogress was not to be expected (p. 186).

After reading Remmert’s book, it seems be-yond question that seventeenth-century authorsdid consider the demonstrative potential of vi-sual arguments that—as they knew—many writ-ten texts did not present. The book provides anextraordinarily richly documented proof of theirawareness that the effective transmission of amessage should involve not only the conceptualbut also the imaginative level of mind.

SIMONE DE ANGELIS

Harald Siebert. Die große kosmologische Kon-troverse: Rekonstruktionsversuche anhand desItinerarium exstaticum von Athanasius KircherSJ (1602–1680). 383 pp., illus., figs., bibl., in-dex. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006. €76(cloth).

Harald Siebert seeks to combine a close study ofAthanasius Kircher’s Itinerarium exstaticumwith an engaging analysis of the great contro-versy on heliocentrism. Siebert’s main thesis isthat the Jesuit scholar’s book was meant as apurposive intervention in the cosmological de-bate. In particular, he argues that Kircher’s ideassubverted the generally accepted experimentumcrucis of Copernicanism: the search for a stellarparallax (pp. 264, 272).

Kircher wrote the Itinerarium exstaticum as areport of a dream voyage through the cosmos.Nevertheless, he also claimed physical truth forthe cosmic system he described. The views heput forward are quite extraordinary for aseventeenth-century Jesuit. He imagined stars ofdifferent sizes, accompanied by planets, turningaround each other and swirling through space.Kircher’s stars are not “fixed” but move in cir-cular orbits and can be part of systems of binaryor multiple stars. Like the Copernicans, Kircherput the stars very far from the earth. He evenassumed a “deep space,” with enormous dis-tances between the closest and the furthest stars.This compelled him, as a geocentrist, to ascribehuge velocities to the stars, for they had to circlearound the earth in twenty-four hours.

Siebert wonders why Kircher would havepropounded such ideas, given that they werecontroversial and could have exasperated hiscensors and superiors. He argues that Kircherwanted to challenge some Copernican presup-positions by imagining a different cosmologicalorder. The lack of an observable stellar parallaxwas the most important anti-Copernican argu-ment. If the earth turns around the sun, one

would expect to see the effect in a shift in thestellar positions. Copernicans responded byclaiming, without real proof, that the stars stoodtoo far away for such a parallax to be seen.

Kircher granted the Copernicans this point.Indeed, it was not unimaginable that, with thehelp of better telescopes, astronomers wouldeventually discover a parallax. But Kircher thenstaged a more subtle challenge for the Coperni-cans. Siebert reconstructs his implicit argumentin the Itinerarium exstaticum as follows. Anyobserved shift in stellar positions can instead beascribed to a circular motion of the stars them-selves. According to Siebert, Kircher also intro-duced stars of different sizes and systems ofdouble stars to undermine the presuppositions ofthe specific methods of searching for a parallax.To conclude: even if a parallax were to be ob-served, it would not prove the motion of theearth.

Siebert’s work is part of the revival of Kircherscholarship and of interest in Jesuit science ingeneral. Die große kosmologische Kontroverseis an engaging analysis of a little-studied andchallenging work in the history of cosmology.Kircher often did not make his intentions ex-plicit, and even his student and editor KasparSchott was sometimes at a loss about how tounderstand his ideas. Siebert does an admirablejob in asking the right questions and in makingsense of Kircher’s statements in light of thecosmological controversy.

Despite the persuasive overall argument,Siebert’s point that Kircher’s book made theobservational search for the stellar parallaxpointless (p. 272) comes across as exaggerated.It is true that one observed parallax is notenough to allow one to infer the earth’s move-ment. But if all the stars exhibit the same (pro-portional) shift in position, it would be over-whelming evidence for a moving earth (Siebertnotes that Huygens made exactly this point).This is an easy and obvious dismissal of Kirch-er’s implicit criticism, and it would be surpris-ing if Kircher had not foreseen it. That Kircher’sspecific aim was to secure geocentrism againstthe discovery of the parallax (p. 302) thereforeseems doubtful. On the other hand, I think wecan retain Siebert’s more general point: thatKircher illustrated the Copernicans’ presupposi-tions and the relativity of their arguments in anentertaining way (p. 163).

Siebert’s attempt to kill two birds with onestone has the disadvantage that it leads to alimited view of Kircher’s complex oeuvre aswell as of the cosmological controversy. Siebertgives only a limited account of the Itinerariumexstaticum, and we lack a good overview of the

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