Arguing about the stars has rarely been more controversial and dangerous than in the early modern period in Europe, especially in Catholic countries, in a time when old and novel conceptions of the heavens, planetary models and theories of celestial motions and influences were intensely debated, revised and scrutinized for philosophical soundness and religious conformity.1 In the hundred years or so that witnessed the birth and censorship of the Copernican theory; the execution in Rome of the most passionate defender of post-Copernican cosmology, Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), and the rise and fall of Galileo Galilei's (1564–1642) fame linked to his novel interpretation of the book of nature, the Catholic Church created some of the most powerful instruments of cultural control and educational conformity ever seen: the Inquisition, the Index of Forbidden Books and the vast network of Jesuit schools that spread from Rome and the Iberian peninsula across the globe.2

The inaugural lecture, or oration, delivered by Regiomontanus at the University of Padua in 1464 is deemed a document of remarkable significance in the history of science. Although it has attracted much scholarly attention, few efforts have been directed towards identifying the traces of Byzantine influence it might carry; that is to say, the extent to which Regiomontanus might have been influenced by the views of his patron, Bessarion. This paper responds to the need for such a study, arriving at the following conclusions. First, Regiomontanus's praise of astrology is in line with Bessarion's reaction to the official decisions taken against astrology in Constantinople at the Council of 1351 – decisions which were ultimately rooted in the hesychast controversy and in the confessional struggles between the Churches of Constantinople and Rome. Second, the legitimation of the Graeco-Arabic roots of astronomy in an institutional context, as undertaken by Regiomontanus, is in accordance with the intellectual influences Bessarion had absorbed in his youth in Constantinople. Third, contrary to some claims, it is likely that Regiomontanus does not adhere to a humanist anti-Arab agenda; rather, his views on the history of mathematics are a consequence of the Graeco-Arabic heritage of his patron, and of his lack of access to Arabic translations.

In the faculty of arts at the University of Padua in the years around 1600 professors debated the reliability of astrology, the existence of occult celestial influences, and the idea that celestial heat is present in living bodies. From the 1570s to the 1620s many professors in the faculty of arts pushed back against astrology and Jean Fernel's theories surrounding astral body. Girolamo Mercuriale, Alessandro Massaria and Eustachio Rudio thought that some forms of astral causation and Fernel's ideas were incompatible with their observations of disease, Aristotle's philosophy and Hippocratic theories. Later, Santorio Santorio and Cesare Cremonini, who were allied to the political circle of Paolo Sarpi, polemicized against astrology. Their writings show that at Padua medical theory was linked to Aristotelian cosmology, which emphasized the incommensurability between celestial and terrestrial elements. Their rejection of astrology, however, did not lead to the complete marginalization of astrology at Padua. By the middle of the 1620s, as the political climate changed in Venice, the University of Padua hired professors who promoted astrology and Fernel's theories about the celestial nature of innate heat. The diversity of opinions about astrology reflected Venice's divided politics and multiple approaches to interpreting Aristotle and other authorities.

This essay deals with the cultural-political motivations behind the cosmological conceptions of the Padua Aristotelian Cesare Cremonini (1550–1631). A defender of the interests of the university against Jesuit teachings, and one of the philosophers who was most frequently scrutinized by the Inquisition, he was an important actor in Venetian cultural politics during the years of European religious conflict that culminated in the Thirty Years War. In those years, he was officially titled ‘protector’ of the multi-confessional German Nation of Artists, one of the largest groups of foreign students at the University of Padua, and had to act as mediator in cases of conflict. His efforts to keep teaching free from religious concerns is reflected by his commitment to pursue philosophical and cosmological inquiries without engaging in revealed theology. In particular, his strict adherence to Aristotelian cosmology proved to be at odds with central Christian dogmas as it relinquished, among other concepts, the ideas of Creation and divine Providence. I argue that this position of Cremonini's fostered a tolerant and universalistic attitude in line with a secular programme that could enable cross-confessional coexistence in a cosmopolitan institution like Padua.

This article explores the complex process of integrating Tycho Brahe's theories into the Jesuit intellectual framework through focusing on the international community of professors who taught mathematics at the College of Saint Anthony (Colégio de Santo Antão), Lisbon, during the first half of the seventeenth century. Historians have conceived the reception of the Tychonic system as a straightforward process motivated by the developments of early modern astronomy. Nevertheless, this paper argues that the cultural politics of the Counter-Reformation Church curbed the reception of Tycho Brahe within the Jesuit milieu. Despite supporting the Tychonic geo-heliocentric system, which they explicitly conceived of as a ‘compromise’ between the ancient Ptolemy and the modern Copernicus, and making recourse to some of the cosmological ideas produced in Tycho's Protestant milieu, the Jesuits strove to confine the authority of the Lutheran astronomer to the domain of mathematics. Philosophy was expected to remain the realm of Catholic orthodoxy. Thus, while Tycho Brahe entered the pantheon of ‘Jesuit’ authorities, he nonetheless was not granted the absolute status of intellectual authority. This case demonstrates how the impact of confessionalization reached well beyond the formal processes of science censorship.

During the transition from the early to the modern era, the marginalization of astrology from the learned world marked a significant shift. The causes of this phenomenon are complex and still partially obscure. For instance, some sociological interpretations have linked it to a broader shift in mentality among the gentry and bourgeoisie, while other scholars attributed the decline to the emergence of the ‘new science’. Focusing on the case of Jean-Baptiste Morin (1583–1656), this paper examines the changing dynamics of patronage for what has been termed ‘the last official astrologer’. It demonstrates that Morin's appointment as professor of mathematics at the Collège royal and his prominence within the French court were expressions of a cultural politics in which his patrons were deeply invested. Conversely, Morin's efforts to restore astrology lent validation to the belief systems of his patrons. The paper further analyses Morin's fall from grace during his polemics with Gassendi and his circle, highlighting the political context of the Fronde and a growing public weariness regarding the relationship between politics and astrology. Ultimately, this case study reveals that in the French context, the marginalization of astrology was not solely determined within the ‘learned jurisdiction’. Instead, the shifting cultural and political investments of the ruling classes played a significant role.

Selenography was both a practice and a tool which developed through optical instrumentation in the seventeenth century. As a practice, it was the process of creating composite graphical depictions of the Moon through skill and sustained telescopic study. As a paper-based tool, the focus of this article, a selenography was a stabilized visualization and codified template for making, organizing and communicating lunar-based astronomical observations. The template's key observation and notation device was its system of named Moon spots, or lunar nomenclatures. Such systems varied significantly in different sites of knowledge making. Through the close study of two naming schemes produced and exchanged in Counter-Reformation contexts by Michael van Langren (1645) and Giovanni Battista Riccioli in collaboration with Maria Francesco Grimaldi (1651), this essay argues that selenographies were conceived with an eye to ideals of universal standardization for collective and even global observation. In practice, however, different forms of universality, revealing distinct local agendas tied to political and religious priorities, were materialized in each competing scheme.

It has been thirty years since the end of political apartheid in South Africa in 1994. Those decades have been marked by single-party dominance under the African National Congress (ANC), and the expansion of democratic rights and public goods like education, as well as neoliberal economic policies, growing inequality and, in recent years, corruption and maladministration scandals. On the heels of a historic election in May 2024, one which marked the end of the ANC's electoral dominance and was shaped, in part, by government mismanagement of the energy sector and extensive infrastructural decline, it is a timely moment to consider the history of South Africa's state and its relation to industries of extraction and energy production. Two new books do just that. Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures, by Gabrielle Hecht, takes a long view of the impact of extractive industries, arguing that contemporary South Africa may offer a cautionary tale of the devastating impacts of the Anthropocene, one that ‘foretells planetary futures’ in the way that the state has failed to reckon with the enduring communal and environmental impacts of the mining industry. Apartheid's Leviathan: Electricity and the Power of Technological Ambivalence, by Faeeza Ballim, historicizes the development of South Africa's electricity sector under the apartheid state and traces the roots of the current energy crisis back to the pursuit of authoritarian high modernism in the mid-twentieth century.

The concept of ‘science’ occupies a distinctive place within our rhetorical inheritance. Tangential to science's actual practices and institutions, this rhetoric holds that science comprises an arsenal of techniques, or a pervasive mentality, that have broadly shaped and even defined modern society. Such notions have been the subject of more or less constant discussion for two or three centuries, with early critics of scientific thought targeting its links to the religious and political radicalism of the Enlightenment and the troubles of industrialization.