Category: Text, English, Engravings, Yale University
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From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, the royal and aristocratic courts behind Europe’s most illustrious festivals printed elaborate, illustrated volumes to record the celebrations that they organized to mark births, deaths, betrothals, weddings, coronations, and visits. Often circulated for the benefit of rival noble families and in the interests of self promotion, festival books are fascinating witnesses to aristocratic culture and art during the Early Modern period.
In the autumn of 1609, the Italian mathematician and astronomer Galileo Galilei turned his telescope to the heavens, deciphering the cratered face of the moon, the four satellites of Jupiter, and other previously opaque features of the heavens. When, in 1610, Galileo published his Sidereus Nuncius, or Starry Messenger, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler responded with enthusiasm, praising the significance of Galileo’s observations with his own Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo, or, Conversations with the Starry Messenger (1610). To whom else did the stars speak in the early modern period?
