Subject:
            Re: Astronomy and Calendar Reform
      Date:
            Thu, 03 Oct 1996 15:03:33 -0700
      From:
            Simon Cassidy <simoncas@pacbell.net>
        To:
            East Carolina University Calendar discussion List <CALNDR-L@ECUVM1.BITNET>

Richard McCarty wrote:

> Does astronomical knowledge evolve in a vacuum, isolated
> from politics and religion?
>

My answer to Rick's wonderfully provocative question is "obviously not!".

Calendars are a sufficient counter-example. Specifically, the Gregorian
Calendar Reform came about, on the one hand because astronomers had
reached a concensus that the sun and moon did not behave as the Nicene
tradition had assumed (the Vernal equinox had moved from its 3rd. century
placement ca. noon 21st. March to ca. noon 10th. March; and the lunar
phases had also moved a number of days away from the ecclesiastical rules)
and on the other hand, because there was an unfolding crisis in the European
power structure (the Reformation and the Vatican's Counter-reformation
response). This ideological battle engendered intellectual competition
between the Protestant intellectuals (predominantly from Northern European
states) and Catholic intellectuals (specifically the newly founded jesuits,
who shortly became the Vatican's Tridentine intellectual shock-troops).

In such an atmosphere the purely academic need for a correction of the calendar
took on the aspect of a powerful weapon in a political struggle for the hearts
and minds of the European peoples. The need to forestall a calendar coup by the
opposition launched the jesuits on their astronomical career (the Gregorian
Reform was hurriedly finalised by Christopher Clavius S.J., as King Frederick
the Protestant employer of Tycho Brahe of Denmark, and Wilhelm "the wise",
Landgrave of Hesse and expert astronomer, were zeroing-in on the exact behaviour
of the Vernal Equinox). Queen Elizabeth of England had her intellectuals on the
job also, that immortal chivalrous exemplar, Sir Phillip Sydney, the diplomat
Daniel Rogers, the spymaster Robert Beale and mathemagician John Dee were all
in close consultation with the German astronomical Landgraf, promoting a
Protestant League of Northern European states to counteract the murderous
Catholic League (mainly French and Spanish) and the agressive missions of the
jesuit intellectuals (mainly Italian, Spanish and German). For all involved,
when and how to reform the calendar was both a political and scientific problem
since e.g. the side that went first would have the advantage and authority of
primacy but might suffer ridicule when they prematurely implemented astronomical
knowledge that could be outdated very quickly.

This story demonstrates the interrelation between theoretical astronomical
development (spurred by political rivalry) and political and religious crises
(feeding on popular insecurity in a cosmos turned upside down by intellectuals
such as Copernicus and Giordano Bruno). We may in fact owe the transition of
European culture from a Renaissance mode to the Enlightenment mode to this
Counter-Reformation Calendar-War, since out of this melee came both, the data
(Brahe's) with which Kepler discovered the elliptical sun-centered nature of the
anomalistic dynamical framework of the planets, and the astronomical telescope
which the jesuits championed (as a Catholic invention) once Galileo had broken
irretrievably the official secrecy around the hush-hush naval wonder weapon
(the "spyglass" or "perspective glass" of e.g. Thomas Harriot, in Roanoke 1586,
probably constructed under instruction from the Digges and/or John Dee).

We also probably owe the very existence of our English-speaking United States
to a still-secret aspect of this Calendar War, but that's another story!
"Ask and you shall receive"!
--
Yours, Simon Cassidy, 1053 47th.St. Emeryville Ca.94608, USA. ph.510-547-0684.