2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
constitution was altogether unsuited for intense study. However, the monstrosity
ascribed to female intellectuals stemmed not just from misogyny, but also from
an alarmist conception of the physiology of thinking itself. The Swiss physician
S. A. Tissot’s treatise De la santÈ des gens de lettres (1766) popularized the
notion that sustained mental activity could have grave bodily effects, including
that of drawing too much energy away from the reproductive organs. Tissot’s
portrait of great thinkers as unfit for procreation struck a resounding chord in
French culture: it contributed to the populationist fever of the day, spawned a
sub-genre of hygienic manuals for scholars, and confirmed the already widespread
sense that philosophes were poor spouses and parents. The ambiguities
surrounding scholars intensified in the 19th century, as the perceived relationship
between intellectual creativity and fecundity grew even more complicated.
Drawing on physiologist X. Bichat’s theory of limited vital energy, medical
writers like J. J. Virey contended that the body’s “cerebral” versus “genital”
poles were so antagonistic that true scholars should abstain from sex altogether.
Nor did thinkers fare much better in the period’s imaginative literature: Honorè
de Balzac, for example, borrowed from contemporary medical constructs to
dramatize the idea that genius imposed severe, sometimes fatal strains on both
the body and social existence. In novels like Louis Lambert (1832) and Bèatrix
(1845), Balzac presented protagonists so torn between their brilliance and desire
for conjugal pleasure that they ended up mad, dead, or monastic.
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James␣ R. Voelkel Johns Hopkins University and
Owen Gingerich Harvard University
Giovanni Antonio Magini’s ‘Keplerian’ Tables of 1614 and their
Implications for the Early Reception of Keplerian Astronomy
In 1614, just five years after Kepler published his strange and challenging
Astronomia nova, Giovanni Antonio Magini (1555-1617), professor of
astronomy at the University of Bologna and one of Europe’s foremost
astronomers, published ‘Keplerian’ tables in his Supplementum Ephemeridum.
At first blush, it would seem that Kepler’s book had had immediate influence.
An analysis of Magini’s hitherto unexamined tables, however, reveals that
Magini had read Kepler quite closely but extracted findings from the
Astronomia nova equally selectively. By doing so, he was able to reduce the
error of predicted locations of Mars by several degrees over Ptolemy and
Copernicus, but without accepting Kepler’s area law, thereby avoiding the
unsatisfying and time-consuming iterative calculations it required. Magini’s
tables would have been more streamlined and intelligible to contemporary
users while equaling Kepler’s accuracy in principle. Understanding Magini’s
instrumentalist adaptation of Kepler’s findings gives us a new perspective for
studying the influence of Keplerian astronomy in the period before Newton.
Kepler’s influence should be sought not in the adoption of his “laws” (so-
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