J. Brit. Astron. Assoc., 108, 4, 1998, p.227
Princeton University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-691-01150-8. Pp xvi + 365, $49.50 (hbk.)
reviewed by W.M. Napier
The author's goal is to trace the history of popular ideas about comets from the earliest historical times through to the early nineteenth century. As Resident Scholar at the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology at the Smithsonian Institution, and former Curator of the History of Astronomy Collection at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, she is well qualified to pursue this task. She has produced a book which is both scholarly and well written. It is full of information, with over eighty pages of notes and forty pages of bibliography. It is also a fascinating read, easily accessible to the general reader.
The nature and origin of comets has been a matter for debate from classical times onwards. Aristotle and others thought they were meteorological, sublunary objects; the Pythagoreans and others regarded them as truly celestial. Comets have been seen as portents of catastrophe, or monsters, from the earliest times. This perception seems to be firmly fixed in the earliest records: the death of princes, civil disorder, war, plague and famine were all presaged by the arrival of comets. Why was this connection made, so strongly and for so long? Made it clearly was, by both common folk and scholars, and the belief was held with remarkable persistence through the ages until relatively recent times. Unfortunately the author does not fully explain this remarkable fact, which permeates the history of the subject.
The history of comets as legitimisers of rule also has a remarkable longevity: for example the author points out that cometary apparition was used to validate the reign of Charles II in 1661 and Augustus in 44 BC (in fact the cometary 'divine right of kings' is of considerably greater antiquity even than this). Still, there was the opposite pull: the appearance of a comet in the sky, with its overtones of divine wrath, a presager of disorder, seems to have had an irresistible attraction for political and religious tub-thumpers. Thus 'During the English Civil War, radical sects, such as the Fifth Monarchists, who were eager to pave the way for the Second Coming, had used millennarian ideology to justify the destruction of a pernicious political order. Comets were seen as signs that the time was right, and public pursuit of the Millennium had convulsive effects.'
The complex interplays between popular and developing scientific beliefs about comets, and their interaction with politics and religion, are carefully traced out. The canvas is a large one, and much emphasis is given to the period of transition between predominantly superstitious views about comets, and those which we would now recognise as scientific. Surprisingly, the author finds that social rather than scientific reasons contributed to the decline of cometary divination, and that ancient folk beliefs, and popular culture, lingered on even in Newton's cosmology. The ancient pagan beliefs about cometary catastrophism were finally laid to rest in the mid-19th century, to be replaced by the 'scientific' view that comets are small, insignificant and irrelevant to the history of the Earth. Then, just when we thought that comets were harmless, along came the modern work on terrestrial catastrophism...
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