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ABSTRACT
At first sight, the English astronomer John Bainbridge's treatise on the great comet of 1618 appears rather idiosyncratic. It regards the comet as a favourable omen and applies an astrological explanation that is completely metaphorical. At closer look, however, Bainbridge's interpretation appears well in line with the meaning commonly attributed to comets at the time. We should realize that an important function of the discourse on prodigious phenomena, such as comets, was to uphold and strengthen the confessional social order. Moreover, the treatise was addressed to the King rather than to the common population. To understand the early modern interpretation of comets, the processes of confessionalization and de-confessionalization deserve more consideration.
Acknowledgements
The article was started as a term paper by the second author and then thoroughly revised (with the permission of the second author) by the first author. The authors owe gratitude to the helpful comments of two anonymous referees on an earlier version of this article.
Disclosure statement
The author declares that he has no known interests that might appear to affect his ability to present data objectively, in the form of financial interests, personal relationships, or otherwise.
Notes
1 Paradigmatic for the traditional view remained for a long time James H. Robinson, The Great Comet of 1680. A Study in the History of Rationalism (Northfield: dissertation Columbia University, 1916).
2 Sara Schechner, Comets, Popular Culture, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology (Princeton, 1999), pp. 104–29. Tabitta van Nouhuys, The Age of Two-Faced Janus. The Comets of 1577 and 1618 and the Decline of the Aristotelian World View in the Netherlands (Leiden: Brill, 1998). Eric Jorink, Reading the Book of Nature in the Dutch Golden Age, 1575–1715 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 109–80.
3 van Nouhuys, pp. 388–403.
4 Anna Jerratsch. Der frühneuzeitliche Kometendiskurs im Spiegel deutschsprachiger Flugschriften (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2020). See also: eadem, ‘Celestial Phenomena in Early Modernity: the Integrated Image of Comets’, in Natural Knowledge and Aristotelianism at Early Modern Protestant Universities, ed. by Pietro Daniel Omodeo and Volkhard Wels (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2019), pp. 187–208, 520 (quote, my translation).
5 The concept of confessionalization has especially been discussed by German historians. See Ernst Walter Zeeden, Die Entstehung der Konfessionen. Grundlagen und Formen der Konfessionsbildung (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1965). Wolfgang Reinhard, ‘Zwang zur Konfessionalisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters’, Zeitschrift für historische Forschung, 10 (1983), 257–77. Heinz Schilling, Kirchenzucht und Sozialdisziplinierung in frühneuzeitlichen Europa (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1994).
6 Heinz Schilling, ‘Confessionalization: Historical and Scholarly Perspectives of a Comparative and Interdisciplinary Paradigm’, in: Confessionalization in Europe, 1555-1700, ed. by John M. Headley, Hans J. Hillerbrand, and Anthony J. Papalas (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 20–35, see esp. p. 33.
7 See for a recent overview Andreas Blank, ‘Confessionalization and Natural Philosophy’, in Cambridge History of Philosophy of the Scientific Revolution, ed. by David M. Miller and Dana Jalobeanu (Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 111–27. Blank's definition is somewhat narrower in that he only discusses the influence of theological contents.
8 Michael Weichenhan, 'Ergo perit coelum … ' Die Supernova des Jahres 1572 und die Überwindung der aristotelischen Kosmologie (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004), pp. 449–50, 388–402. Irene Ewinkel, De monstris. Deutung und Funktion von Wundergeburten auf Flugblättern im Deutschland des 16. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Niemeyer,1995); Volker Leppin, Antichrist und jüngster Tag. Das Profil apokalyptischer Flugschriftenpublizistik im deutschen Luthertum 1548–1618 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlags-Haus, 1999). Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez, De Tachtigjarige Oorlog in Spaanse ogen. De Nederlanden in Spaanse historische en literaire teksten (circa 1548–1673) (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2003), pp. 76–7; see also pp. 119, 157, on natural disasters. See also Ken Kurihara, Celestial Wonders in Reformation Germany (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014), pp. 54–7.
9 Rienk Vermij, Thinking on Earthquakes in Early Modern Europe. Firm Beliefs on Shaky Ground (Abington and New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 4, 65–141, who uses the concept of 'confessionalized science'. Idem, ‘A Science of Signs. Aristotelian Meteorology in Reformation Germany’, Early Science and Medicine 15 (2010), 648–74.
10 Jur van Goor, Jan Pieterszoon Coen [1587–1629]. Koopman-Koning in Azië, 2nd edn (Amsterdam: Boom, 2020), pp. 320, 344.
11 Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer, ‘Attacks on Judicial Astrology, Religious Dissent and the Rise of Skepticism’, in Natural Knowledge and Aristotelianism at Early Modern Protestant Universities, ed. by Pietro Daniel Omodeo and Volkhard Wels (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2019), pp. 123–86 (p. 175). On Erastus, see also Weichenhan, pp. 396–401. Mahlmann-Bauer's conclusion 'that religious non-conformists were more willing to surrender traditional views of nature than Lutheran theologians' however focusses on the connection between religious dissidence and philosophical views on nature, rather than between acceptance (or rejection) of the theological significance of comets and support (or criticism) of the confessional order.
12 John Bainbridge, An Astronomical Description of the Late Comet … with Certaine Morall Prognosticks or Applications Drawne from the Comets Motion and Irradiation amongst the Celestiall Hieroglyphicks (London: Henry Fetherstone, 1618). A second edition from 1619 for John Parker is in all other aspects identical.
13 Mordechai Feingold, The Mathematicians Apprenticeship: Science, Universities and Society in England, 1560–1640 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1984), p. 114. Feingold offers the best overview of Bainbridge's career, see ibid, pp. 143–8, 161–2.
14 Bainbridge, Astronomical Description, pp. 19, 20. Further references to this work are given after quotations in the text. Bainbridge used a ‘Telescopium or Trunke-spectacle’ (19) to determine the distance between the comet and some stars. The great comet of 1618 was observed with a telescope by Kepler, Bainbridge, and the Swiss Jesuit Johann Baptist Cysat, see Jerratsch, p. 324. The first known telescopic observation of a comet had been made by Kepler on September 6th, on one of that year’s earlier comets.
15 This was pointed out to me by Rob van Gent. Johannes Kepler, Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Max Caspar, 22 vols. (München: Beck, 1937-), I (1938), plate between p. 226 and p. 227.
16 Page 25 has the printed number 17.
17 There was a classic precedence for a positive view of comets: the sidus Iulium, the comet that appeared during the funerary festivities of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. However, this hardly influenced later interpretations. See Marion Gindhart, Das Kometenjahr 1618. Antikes und zeitgenössisches Wissen in der frühneuzeitlichen Kometenliteratur des deutschsprachigen Raumes (Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2006), pp. 3–4.
18 Van Nouhuys, pp. 303–21. Cf. Gindhart, p. 70.
19 Later in the century, there are a few other examples of authors regarding comets as announcing good fortune. J. Vulpius considered comets as favourable omens in his Cometologia from 1680, see Jerratsch, p. 411. A Dutch traveler noted in 1665 that in Russia, comets were commonly seen as lucky signs: Nicolaas Witsen, Moscovische reyse 1664–1665. Journaal en aentekeningen, ed. by Th.J.G. Locher & P. de Buck, 3 vols. ('s Gravenhage, 1966–1967), II, pp. 198, 203, 175.
20 Fred van Lieburg, Synodestad. Dordrecht 1618–1619 (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2019), pp. 335–8.
21 Sweder Schele, Stambuch, vol. 2 part 1, p. 827: 'In begin van november fingen die Calvinisthen haren Synodus to Dordrecht an; end als kurtz darop die cometa erschien ginck die sprake: Onser Here Gott hadde vor froluiden een kerse opgestecken.' The manuscript of the chronicle is in Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv Osnabrück, Depositum Gutsarchiv Schele zu Schelenburg. There is a digital version (http://lehre.hki.uni-koeln.de/schele) that needs updating.
22 Thomas Twynne’s Discourse on the Earthquake of 1580, ed. by R.E. Ockenden (Oxford: Pen-in-hand Publishing, 1936) p. 24. See also Vermij, Thinking on earthquakes, p. 122.
23 Arthur H. Williamson, ‘Number and National Consciousness. The Edinburgh Mathematicians and Scottish Political Culture at the Union of the Crowns’, in Scots and Britons. Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603, ed. by Roger A. Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 187–212 (pp. 210–2). Feingold, p. 163. Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Science and Religion at Oxford before the Civil War’, in Puritans and Revolutionaries, ed. by Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 74.
24 Feingold, pp. 140–1, 144. Bernard Capp, ‘Heydon, Sir Christopher (1561–1623)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online). On Heydon's defense of astrology, see Mary Ellen Bowden, The Scientific Revolution in Astrology. The English Reformers, 1558–1686 (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1974) pp. 129–40.
25 The term 'emblemated motion' also on p. 40.
26 [James I and VI], A Counterblaste to Tobacco (London: R.B., 1604).
27 For early depictions of Boötes, see for instance Deborah Warner, The Sky Explored. Celestial Cartography 1500–1800 (New York & Amsterdam: A.R. Liss and Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1979), pp. 10, 17, 31, 33, 62, 72, 91, 124, 128, 133, 189, 205, 269, 271, 275. William B. Ashworth, Out of this World. The Golden Age of the Celestial Atlas (Kansas City (MO): Linda Hall Library, 2007), pp. 15, 20.
28 Gindhart, pp. 77–85.
29 Gindhart, pp. 74–5. For a later example of an allegorical-metaphorical interpretation see Jerratsch, p. 393, on a treatise by Voigt from 1676.
30 Tycho Brahe, Opera omnia, ed. by J.L.E. Dreyer, 15 vols. (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1913–1929; reprint Amsterdam, 1972), III (1916, repr. 1972), pp. 289–94. Theodorus Graminaeus, Erklerung oder Ausslegung eines Cometen (Cologne, 1573). On Graminaeus' book, see Weichenhan, pp. 516–8.
31 Bainbridge, p. 32. Kepler, Gesammelte Werke, I, p. 337.
32 Thomas C. Singer, ‘Hieroglyphs, Real Characters, and the Idea of Natural Language in English 17th-Century Thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989), pp. 49–70. Vaughan Hart, Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts (London & New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 60–3, 158.