Early Book Collections | Ephemeral Renaissance

Sun Spots, Read All About It, 1616

This handsome, hand-colored folio-sized broadside depicts carefully etched views of the sun’s surface depicted through the oculus of a telescope (colored yellow), that carefully track the gradual movement of sunspots over a period of several weeks. The observations were taken by the German mathematician Petrus Saxonius at the Altdorf Academy near Nuremberg between February 24 and March 17, 1616. As a result, this artifact may well constitute one of the earliest popular illustrations of this newly discovered celestial phenomenon, and certainly one of the first to take on ephemeral form.

Saxonius’s sunspot observations were preceded by those of the Jesuit scientist at Ingolstadt, Christoph Scheiner, and the Italian polymath Galileo Galilei. Following his observations of sunspots in 1611, Scheiner published about his work under the title De macvlis solarib[us] (Augsburg, 1612), to which Galileo responded with his momentous Istoria e Dimostrazioni Intorno alle Macchie Solari (1613) bearing meticulous engravings of the sunspots he had observed over a set period of time, lending inspiration surely to the similar method of representation found in this Johns Hopkins broadside.

Whereas Scheiner thought the spots to be satellites, Galileo correctly contended that the spots were actually on or just below the sun’s surface, thus claiming priority over Scheiner in the discovery. This revelation was momentous, for it undermined the nearly two-thousand-year-old Aristotelian cosmological claim that all heavenly bodies extending beyond the earth’s sublunary spheres were perfect and never-changing and comprised of a divine and eternal “quintessence.” The danger to Roman Catholic orthodoxy of solar imperfections are indeed what inspired Scheiner to go into print, albeit anonymously, to argue the spots were simply shadows from passing bodies. Regardless, Saxonius is known to have visited Scheiner on an academic peregrination through Germany in 1614-15; this broadside was thus likely to have been directly inspired by his countryman, if not also by the publication of his Italian rival.

The Hopkins copy of this broadside is one of only three recorded and is the only known copy in North America—the other two are in Munich and Nuremberg. Happily, this colorful popularization of the scientific novelties of telescopy and newly discovered sunspots can be immediately contextualized at Johns Hopkins, which also holds early editions of both the aforementioned Scheiner and Galileo imprints.