-
Tapping a Source: The Frontispiece to Andreas Cellarius’s Harmonia Macrocosmica, a Template for “After the Pleasure Party”
- Leviathan
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 23, Number 1, March 2021
- pp. 75-87
- 10.1353/lvn.2021.0005
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Abstract:
Evert Duyckinck, in a letter of 1848 to his brother George, declared, “By the way Melville reads old Books.” Duyckinck here referred to the Religio Medici of Sir Thomas Browne, which Melville borrowed at that time. The following year in London he purchased a 1686 edition of Browne. Seventeenth-century books that Herman Melville also owned and perused would include books by Samuel Butler, Thomas Hobbes, Sir William D’Avenant, and Beaumont and Fletcher. He also collected seventeenth-century Dutch prints. Given this interest in the seventeenth century, Melville may have had the opportunity to examine the frontispiece to the atlas, Harmonia Macrocosmica, by Andreas Cellarius, a seventeenth-century Dutch-German cartographer, cosmographer, and mathematician.