Dante and the Early Astronomer
Science, Adventure, and a Victorian Woman Who Opened the Heavens
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Explore the evolution of astronomy from Dante to Einstein, as seen through the eyes of trailblazing Victorian astronomer Mary Acworth Evershed
In 1910, Mary Acworth Evershed (1867–1949) sat on a hill in southern India staring at the moon as she grappled with apparent mistakes in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Was Dante’s astronomy unintelligible? Or was he, for a man of his time and place, as insightful as one could be about the sky?
As the twentieth century began, women who wished to become professional astronomers faced difficult cultural barriers, but Evershed joined the British Astronomical Association and, from an Indian observatory, became an experienced observer of sunspots, solar eclipses, and variable stars. From the perspective of one remarkable amateur astronomer, readers will see how ideas developed during Galileo’s time evolved or were discarded in Newtonian conceptions of the cosmos and then recast in Einstein’s theories. The result is a book about the history of science but also a poetic meditation on literature, science, and the evolution of ideas.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Daugherty, professor emeritus of English and creative writing at Oregon State University, combines literary analysis, history of science, travel writing, and astronomy to tell the story of Mary Evershed (1867 1949), a pioneering female astronomer fascinated with the poetry of Dante. He notes that, "more than any of her peers," Evershed "grasped Galileo's use of Dante's art to advance his scientific notions." At a time when women were all but excluded from professional astronomy, Daugherty observes that Mary, working with her husband, John Evershed, in India for 17 years, became "proficient with cameras and spectroscopes" and made significant contributions to the still-developing field. Her best-known work, Dante and the Early Astronomers, published in 1913, explored Dante's use of astronomical imagery in The Divine Comedy and demonstrated just how accurate his descriptions were some scientists now call the poet "astonishingly prescient." Daugherty, by tracing his subject's development as an astronomer and a literary scholar, does an impressive job of capturing the intellectual history of a fascinating woman who crossed disciplines and centuries of astronomical advances during her lifetime.
