Stephen Johnston

As the other external committee member with @eleonoraandriani.bsky.social I'm also hugely looking forward to the results of this doctoral project over the next few years - it will be genuinely fascinating to see the Escorial manuscript deeply investigated and fully unveiled.

The history of wind head iconography on old maps windhead, mapmaking, cartography, decoration, iconography, allegory, study of images, study of maps, representation, maps, symbols, meteorology, artistry

But your St Germain example looks like they are also representing the winds, as they also sometimes appear on ivory diptychs (where it often looks more like they are suffering from food poisoning.). And they are frequently on early printed maps too: oculi-mundi.com/windheads

Clock dial face with cherub heads with wings in the spandrels. Movement of a long case clock by Ahasuerus Fromanteel, London, c. 1665 in the collection of HSM Oxford: https://hsm.ox.ac.uk/collections-online#/item/hsm-catalogue-5738.

And why my diptych dial example? There was a long tradition of cherub heads with wings in the corners of clock faces. Here they are on the dial of a long case clock by Ahasuerus Fromanteel, London, c. 1665. They're also found well into the 18th century (later too?).

(Alt text for image source.)

I think the zodiac must be (at best) suggestive: I can't see how it could have astronomical meaning. (Aries at 6 o'clock would be better since when the Sun enters Aries it's dawn at 6 am.) But perhaps the zodiac iconography would have been seen as reassuringly traditional in 1827?

Outer face of a diptych dial by Leonhart Miller, Nuremberg, 1636 with compass rose and wind names surrounded by wind heads. (Harvard Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, https://chsi.emuseum.com/objects/1/rectangular-ivory-diptych-sundial)

Interesting that almost everything else visible here is quite austere, yet the clock face uses the traditional zodiac as decoration. And cute that there are heads of the winds in the spandrels, and they don't all seem to be suffering from the apparent nausea that commonly afflicts them....

How on earth did I manage to overlook that? 🙄 Not much of an advert for eye-balling on my part....

Hope you enjoy it!

Looks like Agra to me, which would fit with Indian longitude

Front cover of hardback book on 15th-century Viennese astronomer/astrologer Johannes von Gmunden (ed. Simek/Klein, 2012).

Strictly local #Oxford interest, but can't help blurting out #Bodleian news. After at least 40 years of using the central library, and restricted to reading onsite, I've just collected a couple of books which I am about to walk out the door with. A loan, but feels like I'll be apprehended for theft!

Quite a line up !

Very excited to see the proofs of my newest (newest) article for this December’s issue of the Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society.

Though, having said that, I can't offer any sensible suggestions for the potentially enormous digital infrastructure that would be needed for your project idea....

Of course, yes, I now remember that I saw that post of yours. I had thought I was mostly sharing this little find to persuade Josefina that, despite my lack of recent progress, I really was still at work on our joint project. But was I also subconsciously trying to contribute elsewhere too?

The table of oblique ascensions from Goldstein’s edition of the Astronomical Tables of Levi ben Gerson.

Lorch (1942-2021) was then based at #Manchester #UMIST and a fellow student of medieval astronomy – in his case mostly Arabic but also Latin. His copy of Goldstein's edition of this set of tables is a nice reminder that even the most apparently austere scholarship is personally underpinned.

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Flyleaf of a copy of Goldstein’s edition of the Astronomical Tables of Levi ben Gerson with the author’s handwritten dedication.

A real surprise and delight to unpack what I thought was an anonymous purchase and instead discover it was an author’s dedication copy, addressed to Richard [Lorch] “in appreciation of a pleasant visit with you in Manchester”. It was signed by “Bernie” almost exactly 50 years ago.

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Title page of Bernard R. Goldstein, The Astronomical Tables of Levi ben Gerson (1974), with facing frontispiece reproduction of a Hebrew manuscript with a numerical table.

I’m currently working with Josefina Rodriguez-Arribas on the mathematics of early 15th-century Hebrew astrology and decided it would be useful to have an edition of a key primary source to hand.

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Yellow bookmark from Salsus Books in Kidderminster.

Short thread 🧵on the frequently invisible realm of #histsci connections, seen through the medium of #secondhand books – in this case one bought online which arrived in the post today.

#Hebrew #medieval #astronomy #tables
#Manchester

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Well, you only have to give away your email address to get the e-newsletter. But when it arrives it'll definitely be a debit on your time and reading budget so, you're right, maybe not for free after all....

Impossible to overstate how exciting field conferences are for academics. We spend 11.95 months a year with people only understanding 5-15% of our jokes and references, but then for three glorious days 😍😍😍

And now it's even in the Warburg's newsletter this morning - handily available at mailchi.mp/sas/news-fro... even for whose who're not subscribers (through why ever wouldn't you be?). You don't have to scroll down far for "In the Media".

"were devised to make men fall in love with Astronomy, for many times it falleth out so among us, that albeit we are not willing to give ear unto a matter or to read a discourse because it is profitable, yet will we give ear unto it and take pains to read or hear it because it is pleasant"

Though I've always liked Thomas Hood's comment at the end of the C16 when he was discussing his printed celestial maps. He devoted many pages to the "poetical fables" of the constellations that were represented on his engraved plates, and noted that these fables....

I wish that were true, but it's not. I can't bring the context to know how unusual or utterly standard it was to include lines from poetry in this sort of early scholastic writing. (I haven't moved on much since that first approach to Sacrobosco.)

I'm not complaining - or at least I won't be when everyone's contribution is condensed into a diamond-bright thread, and unleashed on the world in 300-character bites....

Makes me think of the first time I ever looked at Sacrobosco's Sphere, and was very surprised at the presence of quotations from classical poetry. Not what I was innocently or naively expecting for a C13 Paris university text. If you find someone to comment on that, I for one would be glad to read!

What a nice initiative - especially the scope for including practising poets. And perhaps you can arm-twist all the participants at the "Teaching the Cosmos" workshop to contribute a thread before they are allowed to leave? 🙂 (Not exactly live-tweeting, but very useful for those of us not there.)

That last image is indeed more suggestive than the other two. It made me think of a parallax diagram, but one that had been somehow combined with sighting the visible moon (perhaps because there is a reference in the text below to Galileo's telescope?)

Just from the letter forms, it's surely much more recent. But undoubtedly from before the period of modern conservation practice! Early 20th century? I can ask Michael Korey at MPS if you're curious. (I don't think he's on Bluesky)

Byzantine Silver Plate Depicting Aratus and Urania This Byzantine silver plate is on view at the Institute as part of the exhibition "Time and Cosmos in Greco-Roman Antiquity".

🧵🧵In the very first instalment of this guest author and fellow stargazer 🤩💫and skywalker 🌌👣series, it is my pleasure to introduce Stamatina Mastorakou (@smasto.bsky.social), the October Cosmopoet! Here's what she had to share about her chosen poem:

As little as possible - I strongly suspect they're not for EIDA analysis! Surely they're just there to signal geometry and astronomy in an impressionistic rather than realistic way - no? (Especially the lower one, where the triangle doesn't even reach the implausible crescent of the moon....)