This article investigates the maps of the moon produced in the mid-seventeenth century by Jesuit Giambattista Riccioli and Johannes Hevelius, whose cartographic projects competed for widespread acceptance. Although Hevelius’s Selenographia was applauded for its many detailed, self-engraved pictures of the moon, his cartography and proposed nomenclature were supplanted by Riccioli’s as offered in Almagestum novum, in spite of the latter’s simplistic pictures and promotion of geocentric cosmology. Exploring this paradox through pictorial analysis, three types of images common to both Selenographia (...) and Almagestum novum are compared, employing an analytical tool developed by Svetlana Alpers in The art of describing. A focus on this debate exposes the tensions evoked by new technologies of vision and competing cultures of visual epistemology in seventeenth-century astronomy. As both selenographers grappled with questions about the role of representation and what kinds of knowledge could be generated visually, the successes and failures of their competing projects present implications for the course of visual astronomy, as well as for our understanding of the use of ‘visual technologies’ in a period of controversy.Keywords: Johannes Hevelius; Giambattista Riccioli ; Svetlana Alpers; Astronomy; Early modern; Moon maps; Visual culture; Images in science. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis essay describes the emergence and stabilization in French and English experimental accounts, in second half of the seventeenth century, of the narrative sequence: X did (some process in the laboratory) and X saw (something happen), where X stands for a pronoun, I or we in English,je, nousoronin French. Focussing on the French case, it shows how the use of the collective pronounonin the experimental accounts registered in the files of the Académie des Sciences is directly related to the (...) will of this newly created institution to assert a collective authority on the production and legitimization of experimental matters-of-fact produced in the laboratory. It is argued, through the case of the discovery of the blind spot in the eye by Mariotte, that this new narrative form imbeds a construal of the experiment as a public spectacle, and of the proof as a witnessing event, which eludes the Academy's attempts to monopolize the process of fact validation and favors the diffusion and display of experiments in front of larger audiences. The question of whether a privileged witness such as the King of France who patronized the Academy could not have constituted by himself a suitable audience to ensure a full legitimization of experimental matters-of-fact while remaning within the bounds of academic practices is addressed. It is answered in the negative by providing evidence for the lack of interest of the absolute monarch in experiments. On the other hand, the outdoor practices of observation and measurement are shown to interfere in a constructive manner with the absolutist power and to capture the attention of the absolutist monarch, where laboratory experiments had failed. It is proposed that natural philosophers in the early modern period bear the burden of proof in buying credibility for the phenomena they try, by paying a tribute to the standing of the patrician elites that witness their experiments. This makes sense in a straightforward manner of the lack of interest of the King of France in a practice which exalts the power of the very group he is trying hard to control through the absolutist structure of power. (shrink)