Academic literature on the topic 'Comets Superstition'

Within their considerable rhetorical arsenal, perhaps the favorite accusations that sixteenth-century Calvinist Reformers lodged against the medieval church and the pious conduct of its followers were those of “superstition and idolatry.” Prominent leaders such as John Calvin and Theodore Beza, erudite theologians and celebrated preachers, local pastors and village elders alike stood ever ready to apply the designations to a variety of religious convictions and habits that they considered the incorrect belief and inappropriate behavior of the uninformed and vulgar. This Calvinist campaign against the superstitious and idolatrous went well beyond an attack on such unscriptural matters as belief in purgatory, veneration of images and relics, or invocation of the saints. It also manifested a deeply felt animosity toward papal Christianity—a hostility often expressed in dramatic and powerful language. One particularly intense example comes from the southern French town of Marsillargues during the early seventeenth century. When two men, who had converted to Calvinism, reverted to their earlier Catholicism several months later, the local Reformed church condemned them for having returned to their “vomit” and “slime.”

Abstract.The first widely distributed printed comet images appear in the Nuremberg Chronicle, whose Latin edition appeared in 1493, followed closely by a German edition. In the first section, we begin our consideration with the comet image that has frequently been cited as a representation of the A.D. 684 apparition of Comet P/Halley. To better understand this image, we present a thorough survey of the 13 comet images that appear in the Chronicle, all reproduced from four woodblocks, representing 14 apparitions between A.D. 471 and A.D. 1472. In the second part, we present an analysis of the unpublished preparatory drawings for the comet images in the handwritten Exemplars (manuscript layout dummies) for both the Latin and German editions in the Stadtbibliothek, Nuremberg. Finally, in the third part, we demonstrate how the Chronicle presaged the proliferation of broadsides--woodcut prints that functioned like tabloids of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We examine broadsides recording historical comets over such Bavarian cities as Nuremberg and Augsburg. In spite of their superstitious, hysterical journalism, fed by turbulent political and religious upheavals, these broadsides reveal a nascent scientific attitude.

Gareth Williams’ engaging new study of Seneca's Natural Questions is called The Cosmic Viewpoint, a pleasing title that evokes his central thesis: Seneca's study of meteorological phenomena is a work where science and ethics are combined, designed to raise the reader up towards a cosmic perspective far beyond mortal woes, the better to combat adversity in Stoic style. Chapter 1, ‘Interiority and Cosmic Consciousness in the Natural Questions’, introduces the idea of Seneca's worldview, contrasting it in particular with the approaches of Cicero and of Pliny. In contrast to Cicero, Seneca's emphasis is on interiorization, and his ‘cosmic consciousness’ takes his perspective far above the Imperial consciousness of Pliny's Encyclopaedia, which for all its all-encompassing scope still takes a terrestrial Roman perspective. In Chapter 2, Williams addresses the question of how Seneca's moralizing interludes are to be understood in relation to the technical discussion of meteorology; this is a key issue for Williams, since his overall thesis is that Seneca's work has an integrated ‘physico-ethical agenda’ (73). From now on the chapters reflect this integration between the moral and the scientific. Chapter 3 focuses on Seneca's discussion of the flooding of the Nile in Book 4a and its integration with the theme of the vice of flattery. In a nice discussion of ‘The Rhetoric of Science’, Chapter 4 argues that Seneca's presentation in Book 4b of his investigation into the question of how hail and snow are produced is such as to invite critical reflection on the scientific procedures involved (these procedures are: reliance on influential authority, argument by analogy, argument by bold inference, competing arguments, and superstition in contention with reason), but that the aim is not to reject the possibility of attaining scientific truth, but rather to suggest that to attain it one must rise above these petty arguments to find the cosmic perspective, and that to do this is in itself morally improving regardless of any knowledge gained. Chapter 5 discusses Seneca's treatment of the winds in Book 5 and his implicit contrast of the natural phenomena with the transgressive actions of human beings who plunder the earth's resources and wage war on one another. Chapter 6 examines the ‘therapeutic program’ (256) of Seneca's treatment of earthquakes in Book 6. Chapter 7 explores how Seneca's treatment of ancient theories about comets reflects the ascension of the mind to the celestial plane that is the ultimate aim of his scientific enquiry. In Chapter 8, Williams discusses the significance of Seneca's excursus on divination within his treatment of thunder and lightning. Finally, a brief epilogue explains the way that the progression of ideas across traditional book order (where the final books are Books 1 and 2) can be understood to serve Seneca's moral programme. This is a rich and compelling study of Seneca's Natural Questions that establishes it as a work of considerable literary and philosophical qualities. Williams’ final, gentle suggestion is that we moderns, too, might find some peace and liberation in Seneca's cosmic viewpoint, far above the troubles of our everyday lives.