The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals As Solar Observatories

by HEILBRON J. L.

• ISBN13: 9780674854338
• ISBN10: 0674854330
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-10-15
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

Between 1650 and 1750, four Catholic churches were the best solar observatories in the world. Built to fix an unquestionable date for Easter, they also housed instruments that threw light on the disputed geometry of the solar system, and so, within sight of the altar, subverted Church doctrine about the order of the universe. A tale of politically canny astronomers and cardinals with a taste for mathematics, The Sun in the Church tells how these observatories came to be, how they worked, and what they accomplished. It describes Galileo's political overreaching, his subsequent trial for heresy, and his slow and steady rehabilitation in the eyes of the Catholic Church. And it offers an enlightening perspective on astronomy, Church history, and religious architecture, as well as an analysis of measurements testing the limits of attainable accuracy, undertaken with rudimentary means and extraordinary zeal. Above all, the book illuminates the niches protected and financed by the Catholic Church in which science and mathematics thrived. Superbly written, The Sun in the Church provides a magnificent corrective to long-standing oversimplified accounts of the hostility between science and religion.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	IX
Introduction	3	(21)
Renaissance and Astronomy	5	(7)
Counter-Reformation and Cosmology	12	(9)
Wider Uses of Meridiane	21	(3)
1. The Science of Easter	24	(23)
The Luminaries and the Calendar	25	(11)
A Scandal in the Church	36	(11)
2. A Sosigenes and His Caesars	47	(35)
Florence	47	(21)
Bologna	68	(9)
Rome	77	(5)
3. Bononia Docet	82	(38)
A New Oracle of Apollo	82	(19)
Astronomia Reformata	101	(19)
4. Normal Science	120	(24)
Perfecting the Parameters	123	(14)
Repairs and Improvements	137	(7)
5. The Pope's Gnomon	144	(32)
Calendrical and Other Politics	144	(11)
The Meridian in Michelangelo's Church	155	(11)
Meridiane and Meridians	166	(10)
6. The Accommodation of Copernicus	176	(43)
Heliometers and Heliocentrism	176	(11)
Protective Measures	187	(10)
Book Banning	197	(22)
7. The Last Cathedral Observatories	219	(46)
The Things Themselves	219	(15)
Their Results	234	(12)
Their Competitors	246	(19)
8. Time Telling	265	(28)
Some Means of Conversion	266	(9)
The Equation of Time	275	(9)
More Light Play	284	(9)
Appendices	293	(10)
Abbreviations	303	(2)
Works Cited	305	(24)
Notes	329	(26)
Credits	355	(2)
Index	357