ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Christoph Scheiner and His Peers: Correspondence, Dissent, and Cosmological Debates in Early Seventeenth-Century Ingolstadt

• In Event: Scientific Disputes, Cosmological Theories from Scheiner to Cassini: Archival Sources in the 17th Century 1

English Abstract

In the early seventeenth century, a series of astronomical observations of so-called celestial novelties provoked profound anxiety among Jesuit scholars at the University of Ingolstadt. The observation of phenomena such as sunspots and comets traversing the celestial region appeared to disrupt the traditional Aristotelian cosmos. In this context, an extensive correspondence was exchanged among professors at Jesuit colleges in southern Germany, as well as with the mathematical community of the Collegio Romano. An analysis of this corpus of correspondence, together with other materials such as lecture notes, academic dissertations, and textbooks, reveals the various ways in which scholars sought to accommodate new data and theories. This process gave rise to heated debates in which scholars employed diverse strategies to advance their ideas. In extreme cases, they even engaged in acts of self-censorship. A specific case concerning Christoph Scheiner’s theory on celestial (in)corruptibility will be analysed. A comparative analysis of private correspondence and manuscript lecture notes sheds light not only on the complex process of elaborating a theory within a culture permeated by censorship but also on the substantive content of these theories.

Author

• Luís Carolino, ISCTE-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, CIES