Thinking the cosmos in the seventeenth century: Fiction, hypothesis and astronomy from Kepler to Huygens

Journal article

This article offers an account of the ways in which astronomers used fiction in the great age of telescopic discovery. The aim is to reinterpret the relation between fiction and astronomy, using close readings of the literary techniques in the works of Johannes Kepler and Christiaan Huygens. Recent historians of the telescope such as Albert van Helden have rightly argued that observatory work remained a private occupation, and was thus hard to present as public knowledge. The analysis presented here explains the need for such astronomical work to be linked with various forms of fiction : by constructing narratives of displacement and journeying, in which specially qualified delegates were imagined as travelling between Earth and space, the verisimilitude of Copernicanism could be developed.

Authors: Aït-Touati, F

• Journal: Annales
• Volume: 65
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 325-344
• Publication date: 2010-01-01
• ISSN: 0395-2649
• Language: French