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Early modern printmakers trained observers to scan the heavens above as well as faces in their midst. Peter Apian printed the Cosmographicus Liber (1524) to teach lay astronomers their place in the cosmos, while also printing practical manuals that translated principles of spherical astronomy into useful data for weather watchers, farmers, and astrologers. Physiognomy, a genre related to cosmography, taught observers how to scrutinize profiles in order to sum up peoples' characters. Neither Albrecht Dürer nor Leonardo escaped the tenacious grasp of such widely circulating manuals called practica. Few have heard of these genres today, but the kinship of their pictorial programs suggests that printers shaped these texts for readers who privileged knowledge retrieval. Cultivated by images to become visual learners, these readers were then taught to hone their skills as observers. This book unpacks these and other visual strategies that aimed to develop both the literate eye of the reader and the sovereignty of images in the early modern world.
This contribution will consider early modern and analytic descriptions of sundials as ‘cosmographic instruments’, and consider the advantages and disadvantages of classing dials, globes, and certain paper volvelles as ‘cosmographic’ rather than simply ‘mathematical’ instruments. It will thus contribute to historiographical debates about how historians of scientific instruments and mathematical practice can best acknowledge and make use of period descriptions of instruments and disciplines without either overwriting them with our own categories, on the one hand, or appropriating them in such a way as to disguise genuine variations in terminology across different languages, cultures, and settings. The discussion will connect to broad classes of objects in the Whipple collections, but also to specific objects such as the ‘Regiomontantus-type’ dial and the ‘Castlemaine’ or ‘English’ globe, as well as drawing on some examples from the Whipple Library’s rare book collections.
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