How did people think about the cosmos before space travel? Chloe Fairbanks and Mary Hitchman are joined by Aylin Malcolm (University of Pennsylvania) and Dr Todd Borlik (University of Huddersfield) to discuss how people interpreted their relationship to the planets and stars, from 700 to 1700.

Disclaimer: Sound quality affected by recording restrictions due to COVID-19.

Works Consulted 

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, ed. and trans. Michael Swanton (Phoenix Press: London, 2000)

Bede, On the Nature of things and On Times, trans. Calvin B. Kendall and Faith Wallis (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010)

*John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980)

*Hester Pulter, Poems, Emblems, and the Unfortunate Florinda, ed. Alice Eardley (New York and Toronto: Iter Press, 2014) [see also The Pulter Project, https://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/#]

General Reading

Evan Andrews, ‘A Brief History of Halley’s Comet’, History (2016, rev. 2020) https://www.history.com/news/a-brief-history-of-halleys-comet-sightings

Todd Borlik (ed.), Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance: An Ecocritical Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Matthew Beaumont, Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (London: Verso, 2015)

Seb Falk, The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science (Allen Lane: London, 2020)

D. L. Neuhäuser and R. Neuhäuser, ‘“A red cross appeared in the sky” and other celestial signs: Presumable European aurorae in the mid AD 770s were halo displays’, Astronomische Nachrichten 336 (2015), pp. 913-929

Sophie Page, Astrology in Medieval Manuscripts (London: British Library, 2017)

William Poole, Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2017)

George Saliba, A History of Arabic Astronomy: Planetary Theories during the Golden Age of Islam (New York: New York University Press, 1994)

Music:

'Fjeld' by Alexander Nakarada (www.serpentsoundstudios.com)

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