ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Almanacks as an Epistemic Tool: Negotiating Cosmological Knowledge through Text and Image in Seventeenth-Century England

• In Event: Recasting the History of Almanacs 1

English Abstract

This paper explores almanacks as dynamic sites where cosmological knowledge was popularised and negotiated through both text and image. Both older and recent scholarship has emphasised the importance of authorship and the complex relationships between printers, authors, and readers in shaping the early modern almanack market. Building on these insights, this paper examines how the interplay of manuscript and print cultures formed a crucial semantic layer of the almanack’s meaning and reception in seventeenth-century England. Particular attention is given to the power of diagrams and visual schemata in mediating cosmological and astronomical theories – fields that, while circulating widely in scholarly and vernacular literature, took on distinctive forms within the almanack’s hybrid and iterative format. By analysing iconographic and typographic strategies, this study highlights how almanacks created an interactive visual language that fuelled dialogue between makers and audiences. Finally, the paper considers the material and intellectual afterlife of almanacks in seventeenth-century commonplace books, where cut-out or redrawn diagrams, tables, and advertisements continued to shape personal engagements with knowledge. In doing so, it invites discussion of the almanack as an interdiscursive device within the broader epistemic processes of the period – negotiating new means of expressing, visualising, and circulating scientific knowledge

Author

• Barbara Bienias, Institute for the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences