Widmung, Welterklärung und Wissenschaftslegitimierung: Titelbilder und ihre Funktionen in der Wissenschaftlichen Revolution (review)

Visual material has attracted increasing attention from historians of science in recent years. Volker Remmert's meticulous and closely-argued study of a particular class of images — the engraved titlepages, titlepage vignettes, and frontispieces of seventeenth-century mathematical texts — shows just how much they mattered in the reconfiguration of early modern disciplines, and how much they can convey to us now. Remmert examines their use in debates over the system of the world, as devices to legitimate and promote mathematics through visual association with the arts of war and the benefits of trade, as means to stress the nobility and antiquity of astronomy and the transition from one stage of the discipline or authority to another, and as attempts to construct and display patronage relationships. His treatment is as beautifully produced as it as carefully documented, with more than a hundred illustrations.

Remmert's analysis is most powerful when he shows how inattention to visual material has affected historical interpretations of especially well-studied debates. In his study of the title page of the fifth volume of Christoph Clavius's Opera mathematica, which occupies the first substantive chapter of the book, he exposes the true extent of the difficulty that Galileo Galilei faced in advocating the Copernican world-system in the 1610s. Galileo, as is generally well-known, got himself and heliocentrism into difficulty through his attempts to interpret scripture in ways that were compatible with the mobility of the earth and the immobility of the sun, and part of his problem was that he lacked the creden-tials to undertake scriptural exegesis in the post-Tridentine Catholic world. What Remmert shows, however, is that Clavius, as the most authoritative Catholic astronomer of his day, had been using scriptural passages to combat Copernicanism since the first edition of his In sphaeram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco commentarius of 1570 — a fact alluded to on the Opera's title page — and that subsequent exegetes often rested their interpretations of the same biblical texts on Clavius's geocentric astronomy. In seeking to break through this circle of mutually reinforcing intertextuality, Galileo's apparent boldness in invoking the first principles of exegesis would actually seem to have been borne of necessity.

Uncovering this insight necessarily takes Remmert some distance from purely visual material. In the work as a whole, however, what is most striking is, on the one hand, the existence that title page images and frontispieces enjoyed semi-independently of the texts to which they were attached, and, on the other, their capacity to underscore and to represent particular knowledge-claims — to the point, on occasion, of rendering explicit what the text only implied. Remmert constructs reception-histories of several such images, demonstrating that their later reuse not only provides evidence of the way they have been read, but also shows how they have been adapted to serve slightly different ends. A well-known example is the title page to John Wilkins's A discourse concerning a new world & another planet (1640), which draws on the iconography of the frontispiece to Galileo's Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (1632), but Remmert discusses further versions of this scene and a number of others.

Remmert is an extremely perceptive interpreter of his visual material, and in some cases a bold one, but in one place I think he overlooks a possible reading. In the fifth chapter of the book he treats the use made by Tycho Brahe and others of the figures of Atlas and Hercules as mythical practitioners of astronomy, and in the sixth he discusses the use made of visual representation of a noble line of astronomers that frequently included Hipparchus, Ptolemy, Alfonso X of Castile, and Copernicus. Remmert argues that the famous frontispiece of the Tabulae Rudolphinae (1628), which represents a version of this astronomical lineage with various astronomers assigned to columns of different ages...