Where is science bred? Is it where the physical circumstances are right – clear skies for astronomy, for example? Where raw materials are abundant – coal for organic chemistry? Where minds freely meet? Where the enlightened patron rules?
Violet Moller’s first book, The Map of Knowledge, examined the spread through the centuries of the ideas of Galen, Euclid and Ptolemy by focusing on seven, mainly Mediterranean cities, from Alexandria to Venice, where scientific knowledge was gathered, augmented and promulgated anew, ensuring the survival of classical learning into the modern period. But why these men and these cities? Are people or places the drivers? Is geography a reliable guide, a storytelling device, or an artificial constraint? There are clearly losses in this approach. What about Archimedes? What about China? But what are the gains?
Inside the Stargazer’s Palace takes a similar broad-brush approach, as Moller continues the story of science’s spread, shifting her lens northward and tightening her frame to the 16th century. The careers of her principal subjects, the Polish mathematical astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, the Elizabethan alchemist and magus John Dee and the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, span the century. She calls these men ‘heroes of science’, but argues, too, for the importance of ‘places and conditions’. Seven new places lead us from Nuremberg to Prague, via Louvain, Mortlake, Kassel and the Danish island of Hven. Yes, Mortlake, in Surrey. The fact that a sleepy Thames-side village is one of the stops on our journey might alert us that these are not all places renowned as hubs of intellectual ferment, while the choice of the final destination, Francis Bacon’s entirely imaginary ‘New Atlantis’, should finally tip us the wink that it can’t really be place that matters.
Nevertheless, Moller insists, ‘this narrative is based around places’. Although she avoids drawing grand conclusions about what they held in common, it is clear that stable politics and relative religious tolerance are important, as well as wealthy and interested (or at least indulgent) patrons. In a few places, she might have dug a little deeper and found a more autochthonous reason for local success. The metalworkers of Nuremberg, for example, achieved pre-eminence in the making of timepieces, so vital for accurate astronomy, because of the Ore Mountains near by.
Inevitably, I came to this task with a list of figures I hoped to meet along the way. Many do appear (the anatomist Vesalius, the chemist Paracelsus and the surveyors Mercator and Frisius). But others do not (the Dutch mathematician Simon Stevin, the investigator of magnetism William Gilbert, the Polish alchemist known as Michael Sendivogius and the German metallurgist Georg Agricola). Was their work not worthy, or were they simply in the wrong places? Does Johannes Kepler drop in merely because he is in Prague as well as Tycho? At times it seems the tail wags the dog.
In Tycho Brahe’s palace on Hven there were coloured rooms, allegorical figures and instruments everywhere
But forget these quibbles and enjoy the ride. It’s an appealing method: follow the stories of the people, but imagine visiting the places, which are handsomely evoked. Now mostly backwaters, they largely preserve their history and surely offer tempting scholarly tourist opportunities.
Here we are with Tycho on Hven:
Uraniborg, the Castle of Urania, named for the muse of astronomy, was a stunning Renaissance palace, a luxurious family home complete with studies, observatories and laboratories. The design was perfectly symmetrical, set within a diamond-shaped enclosure with gates on four sides and avenues leading to each of the four facades of the building… It was built of brick with sandstone flourishes, gables and domed turrets, curved glass glinting in the windows. It was exquisite, small yet perfectly proportioned and elegantly decorated.
There were coloured rooms, allegorical figures, and instruments everywhere.
The key sites are then not geographies but these scientific nests. The ‘palace’ of Moller’s title is well chosen. It is the theatres of observation and experiment that these men built around them – part library, part workshop, part laboratory or observatory – that they have in common and that are not only the seats of their own work but also busy interchanges for books and scholars as they travel through Europe. Like the studio of Albrecht Dürer – one of a number of artists who add to the rich cross-weave of this book – these special spaces brought creation and manufacture (of artworks, instruments, texts) under one roof. These were workers who made sure to control the means of production.
Dee’s house in Mortlake, though less grand than Hven, which Tycho ran as his own feudal kingdom, was another such palace, as important for its many books as for its brilliant resident. Dee’s negotiations with Queen Elizabeth’s minister William Cecil are well recounted, and illustrate the nuances in the constant bartering of knowledge for patronage that colours scientific life in this period. We catch up with Dee again when he travels to the courts of Wilhelm IV in Kassel and Rudolf II in Prague.
Moller has hardly a word to say about universities, although dozens of them had arisen by 1600, most often in Italy, France and Iberia. The magical-scientific activities of alchemy and astrology-astronomy demanded greater creative freedom than these institutions were prepared to offer.
The grand project that binds most of these people and places is the cataloguing of the stars. Astronomy in this age before telescopes was largely a matter of determining the altitude and azimuth (the horizontal angle off North) of celestial bodies, and their distance away from Earth, which was estimated by parallax and left plenty of scope for disagreement. Parallax calculations require measurements to be made in different places – an important reason for distant observers to communicate with one another.
There were in addition a couple of spectacular and timely phenomena to make everyone talk: first, the appearance in the night sky of a new star, Tycho’s supernova, in 1572, which punctured the Aristotelian idea of the unchanging celestial sphere; and then the intrusion into the solar system of the great comet of 1577, which was estimated by parallax to have passed ‘above the moon, close to the orbit of Venus’. Moller’s claim that this was the ‘first time that a diverse group of scholars in such a wide range of locations had discussed their findings on a single subject’, seems reasonable enough, although she offers no source for it.
Unsurprisingly, given the flux of intellectual activity she is describing, one or two figures make appearances without being properly introduced. There are some obvious errors, too. It seems improbable that the impoverished octogenarian Dee could have given his alchemical collaborator Edward Kelly a telescope, as the first one had been demonstrated in Holland only a few months before he died. And Descartes cannot have been annoyed that the French Academy of Sciences followed Baconian principles because he had been dead more than a decade by the time of its foundation.
Moller is not shy of a cliché, either. Laboratories have ‘gleaming’ glassware, ‘sooty’ furnaces and ‘esoteric’ manuscripts; collections are ‘scattered to the winds’; the Charles Bridge is ‘iconic’; Dürer’s monogram ‘an early modern Apple logo’. But all this is of a piece with the pacy narrative and is easily forgiven.
Long ago, I wrote an article about the (very few) British scientists’ homes one can visit as a member of the public. I spoke to the biologist Lewis Wolpert, then chairman of the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science, who was not persuaded. ‘One wants to know if Beatrix Potter lived surrounded by bunny rabbits,’ he told me. ‘But science isn’t like that. Where scientists live has very little to do with the way they think.’
He had a point, I felt, although, too, an uninspiring way of thinking. As Moller tells us towards the end of the journey, in fact none of her ‘palaces’ much outlived their creators, surely proving once and for all that place cannot be the significant factor. Yet the test of Inside the Stargazer’s Palace, I had decided at the outset, would be whether I wanted to go anyway, to sop up the atmosphere, to measure the intellectual background radiation. By the end, I wanted to visit all these places.
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