The Invention of Discovery, 1500–1700

James Dougal Fleming

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317027065
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: History

The early modern period used to be known as the Age of Discovery. More recently, it has been troped as an age of invention. But was the invention/discovery binary itself invented, or discovered? This volume investigates the possibility that it was invented, through a range of early modern knowledge practices, centered on the emergence of modern natural science. From Bacon to Galileo, from stagecraft to math, from martyrology to romance, contributors to this interdisciplinary collection examine the period's generation of discovery as an absolute and ostensibly neutral standard of knowledge-production. They further investigate the hermeneutic implications for the epistemological authority that tends, in modernity, still to be based on that standard. The Invention of Discovery, 1500-1700 is a set of attempts to think back behind discovery, considered as a decisive trope for modern knowledge.

Chapter 1 That full-sail voyage”: Travel Narratives and Astronomical Discovery in Kepler and Galileo

Piers Brown

DOI: 10.4324/9781315556581-2

In the prefatory epistle to his Astronomia nova (1609), Johannes Kepler uses a series of related allegorical images to celebrate his discovery of the elliptical orbit of the planet Mars. He begins by announcing to his Imperial master, Rudolf II: “I am now at last exhibiting for the view of the public a most Noble Captive, who has been taken for a long time now through a difficult and strenuous war waged by me under the auspices of Your Majesty.” ¹ Kepler’s description figures his book as a triumph in which, “riding in the triumphal car,” he “will display the remaining glories of our captive that are particularly known to [him], as well as all the aspects of the war, both in its waging and in its conclusion.” ² Kepler goes on to describe how Mars was brought to bay:

¹ Johannes Kepler, New Astronomy, trans. William H. Donahue (Cambridge, 1992), p. 30. See also Bruce Stephenson, Kepler’s Physical Astronomy (New York, 1987); and James R. Voelkel, The Composition of Kepler’s Astronomia nova (Princeton, 2001). ² Kepler, New Astronomy, p. 31.

whenever he [i.e. Mars] was driven or fled from one castle, he repaired to another, all of which required different means to be conquered, and none of which was connected to the rest by an easy path—either rivers lay in the way, or brambles impeded the attack, but most of the time the route was unknown. ³

³ Ibid., pp. 33–4.

While the sites of difficulty in his calculations are described as castles that must be besieged and overcome, and Mars, the hunt’s quarry, provides an objective for the chase, the unknowability of the paths between these sites presents a problem that must be addressed.

Kepler’s imagery provides an important comparison to William Eamon’s work on the venatio, or hunt, as a scientific metaphor in the early-modern period. For Eamon, the venatio embodied a new, objective attempt to uncover the secrets of nature. ⁴ Eamon connects this new epistemological attitude to early-modern narratives of travel and exploration. Yet the venatio and the travel narrative—implied by Kepler’s dedication to Rudolph (as cited above)—would seem to suggest quite distinct tropes for seeing the world. The venatio is primarily goal-oriented, deliberately seeking out the traces of its quarry (the facts). On exactly that basis, however, the venatio is vulnerable to the epistemological paradox of pre-cognition, or foreknowledge. Only if one knows, to some extent, what facts are out there can one know how, and where, to hunt for them. The travel narrative, by contrast, entails no such paradox. Navigational exploration can function randomly or haphazardly, being no more interested in its putative destination than in the places, peoples, and objects that it encounters along the way. Precisely by enabling a mode of accidental discovery, in other words, travel and exploration are superior to the hunt as tropes for scientific objectivity.

⁴ William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, 1994), pp. 269–300; quotation at p. 271. On books of secrets, see also Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, 1994); and Allison Kavey, Books of Secrets: Natural Philosophy in England, 1550–1600 (Urbana, 2007).

In this chapter, I will examine the use of travel narrative (as opposed to venatio) in Kepler’s Astronomia nova (1609) and Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius (1610). I will argue that the trope offers not only an organizational frame for historical accounts of exploration, but also an hermeneutics of discovery that focuses on error as beneficial precisely because of the accidental discoveries it produces. To this end, I will discuss the importance of travel narratives as a form of early-modern knowledge-making; examine Kepler’s description of travel narrative as a system for historical narrative in his account of the mathematical exploration of Mars’s orbit; and consider Kepler’s insistence on the importance of difficulty as a vital component of the process of discovery. Finally, I will turn to the Sidereus nuncius and discuss its narrative of accidental discovery in the context of Kepler’s travel metaphor.

“Although we by no means become Argonauts”: Narrative Organization and Mathematical Exploration in Kepler's Astronomia nova

During the European age of expansion, travel produced not only new trade goods and accounts of foreign places and peoples, but also a paradigmatic image of the acquisition of knowledge. Old forms and ways of knowledge shifted and transformed in response to the influx of new geographical and anthropological information. ⁵ Francis Bacon signals the importance of long-distance networks of trade to early-modern knowledge production in his depiction of the idealized scientific community in the utopian New Atlantis (1625). A significant component of this research community are the “Merchants of Light”: scientific intelligencers who travel incognito, seeking out and gathering together information on technological developments and natural particulars from all corners of the world:

⁵ See Anthony Grafton, with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA and London, 1992); and Harold Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven and London, 2007).

For the several employments and offices of our fellows; we have twelve that sail into foreign countries, under the names of other nations (for our own we conceal); who bring us the books, and abstracts, and patterns of experiments of all other parts. These we call the Merchants of Light. ⁶

⁶ Francis Bacon, The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford, 1996), p. 486.

Travel narratives were an important early-modern method of transmitting knowledge gained during the process of exploration. As Ann Blair has pointed out, the order of a work posed a serious problem for natural philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. ⁷ While earlier genres, such as the navigatio, were comparatively disorganized, the late sixteenth century saw the development of the “relation”—a broad tradition that included the Relazioni of Venetian ambassadors, and the Jesuit relations—along with a formal theory of travel writing, the Ars apodemica ⁸ As a result, the genre of the travel narrative came to provide a framework for gathering “facts” into natural histories. ⁹ This framework also proved to be strikingly useful for other presentations of scientific knowledge.

⁷ See Ann Blair, Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton, 1997), pp. 30–40, 49–81. ⁸ See Justin Stagl, The Age of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel, 1550–1800 (Chur, 1995), pp. 47–94. On the relation, see Filippo de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford, 2007); and Steven J. Harris, “Mapping Jesuit Science: The Role of Travel in the Geography of Knowledge,” in John W. O’Malley, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy (eds), The Jesuits: Cultures, Science, and the Arts, 1540–1773 (Toronto, 1999), pp. 212–40. ⁹ See Barbara Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca and London, 2000), pp. 63–85; Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts (Philadelphia, 2001), pp. 97–148; Lorraine Daston, “Baconian Facts, Academic Civility, and the Pre-History of Objectivity,” Annals of Scholarship, 8 (1991): 337–63; Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1995); and Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

In the Astronomia nova, Kepler uses specifically geographical, not cosmological, thinking to explain the very organization of his astronomical work. He compares his account to a travel narrative, in which the incidents of the voyage, as much as the destination, are likely to be of interest to the reader:

Here it is a question not only of leading the reader to an understanding of the subject matter in the easiest way, but also, chiefly, of the arguments, meanderings [ambagibus], or even chance occurrences by which I the author first came upon that understanding. Thus, in telling of Christopher Columbus, Magellan, and of the Portuguese, we do not simply ignore the errors [errores] by which the first opened up America, the second, the China Sea, and the last, the coast of Africa; rather, we would not wish them omitted, which would indeed be to deprive ourselves of an enormous pleasure in reading. So likewise, I would not have it ascribed to me as a fault that with the same concern for the reader I have followed this same course in the present work. For although we by no means become Argonauts by reading of their exploits, the difficulties and thorns of my discoveries infest the very reading—a fate common to all mathematical books. Nevertheless, since we are human beings who take delight in various things, there will appear some who, having overcome the difficulties of perception, and having placed before their eyes all at once this entire sequence of discoveries, will be inundated with a very great sense of pleasure. ¹⁰

¹⁰ Kepler, New Astronomy, pp. 78–9.

Kepler’s comparison of his work with travel narratives draws attention to the genre’s effectiveness as a narrative and organizational form. He suggests that the Astronomia nova, like the accounts of Christopher Columbus, Magellan, and the Portuguese—even the Argonauts—will hold the attention of its readers because of the surprises of its meandering form and the pleasures of vicarious discovery. Only once the work has been rea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Introduction: The Invention of Discovery, 1500–1700
• 1 “That full-sail voyage”: Travel Narratives and Astronomical Discovery in Kepler and Galileo
• 2 Francis Bacon and the Divine Hierarchy of Nature
• 3 “Invention” and “Discovery” as Modes of Conceptual Integration: The Case of Thomas Harriot
• 4 The Undiscoverable Country:Occult Qualities, Scholasticism, and the End of Nescience
• 5 Spirits, Vitality, and Creation in the Poetics of Tommaso Campanella and John Donne
• 6 Perfection of the World and Mathematics in Late Sixteenth-Century Copernican Cosmologies
• 7 Discovery in The World: The Case of Descartes
• 8 Numbering Martyrs: Numerology, Encyclopedism, and the Invention of Immanent Events in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments
• 9 Unearthing Radical Reform: Antiquarianism against Discovery
• 10 The Discovery of Blackness in the Early-Modern Bed-Trick
• 11 Newness and Discovery in Early-Modern France
• Afterword: The Art of the Field
• Bibliography
• Index