Part 1. "Who announces the ages of the moon?" (Amergin, from the 12th century Irish Book of Leinster)

We will all be moon gazing on 20th July, 50 years since the first man stepped onto the moon, that "mythical " body watched in the night skies for  thousands of years.  Just 360 years ago, like Galileo and other contemporary astronomers,  Thomas Harriot, mathematician and navigator, with his splendid new telescope drew this map of the surface of the moon, although unlike Galileo, author of Sidereal Nuncio (or Starry Messenger)  in 1610, he never published his discoveries.  His friend and patron Sir Walter Raleigh  ended in the Tower, so maybe Harriot was being circumspect in uncertain political times.

Thomas Harriot's map measures just 6 ins across, and shows the 5-day-old moon's surface, 

as observed on 26th July 1609      © Petworth House Archives.

In 1679, the best map of the moon's surface for many years was compiled by Giovanni Domenico Cassini, the Director of the Paris Observatory, using a 34 ft telescope, and this was engraved for publication by Claude Mellan and widely copied.  

Cassini's Map of the moon, showing Cape Heraclides  and Sinus Iridium,   c. 1679

(wikimedia commons)

The light from the moon itself also contributed to the sciences from which the capacity for travel into space developed.  In eighteenth century Britain, the full moon lit the way for men of ideas to travel to meet together,  like the "Lunar Society" of Birmingham.  Its key members were Erasmus Darwin, Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood and Joseph Priestley (discoverer of oxygen);  there must have been many such meetings elsewhere and on other continents, made practicable by moonlit nights. 

In seventeenth century Europe, the moon became not just a worldwide focus of ancient myth and legend in different cultures, or a universal practical guide to time and navigation, but now, as seen through the  astronomers' new telescopes, an intriguing subject of space travel stories, another aspect of this new spirit of scientific  exploration.  It becomes another New World, often a distant Utopia. 

One of Ben Jonson's court masques for James I in 1620 was News from the New World discovered in the Moon, (based on a classical Greek tale), but the bestseller of its day, The Man in the Moone, 1638, was written probably in the late 1620s by Francis Godwin, the Bishop of Hereford using a pseudonym.    

An early astronaut is transported to the moon by flying geese.  

 Bristol Delft plate c. 1740  Glaisher collection  © Fitzwilliam Museum 

It is also in the later seventeenth century that sees the discovery of the elephant in the moon --  but more of that and other tales in my next blog.

  

Sweet Swan of Avon, 23rd April 1616

Reader, looke  Not on his Picture, but his Booke

(Folger Shakespeare Library)

Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon

"To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us

Sweet Swan of Avon! What a sight it were

To see thee in our water yet appear,

And make those flights upon the banks of Thames

That so did take Eliza, and our James!

But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere

Advanc'd and made a constellation there!

Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage

Or influence, chide, or cheer the drooping stage;

Which since thy flight from hence hath mourn'd like night,

 And despairs day, but for thy volume's light."

Ben Jonson,  from the dedication to Shakespeare's First Folio, published 1623

The Swan Fountain  1996, celebrating  Stratford's 800th Anniversary (sculptor Christine Lee)

The river at Stratford upon Avon

A grace for London Taverns

"Long since, in King James's time, I have heard my uncle Danvers say (who knew him) that he lived without Temple Bar, at a comb-maker's shop about the Elephant and Castle*.  In his later time he lived in Westminster, in the old house under which you pass as you go out of the churchyard into the old palace; where he died.
…
A Grace by Ben Jonson, extempore, before King James:
'Our king and queen, the Lord-God bless
The Paltzgrave, and the Lady Bess,
And God bless every living thing
That lives, and breathes, and loves the king,
God bless the Council of Estate,
And Buckingham, the fortunate.
God bless them all, and keep them safe,
And God bless me, and God bless Raph.'

The king was mighty inquisitive to know who this Raph was.  Ben told him 'twas the drawer at the Swan tavern, by Charing Cross, who drew him good canary.  For this drollery his majesty gave him a hundred pounds."

Brief Lives  John Aubrey

 The Workes of Benjamin Jonson, Folio edition 1616

Folger Shakespeare Library

* "In the south suburbs, at the Elephant,

Is best to Lodge: I will bespeak  our diet,

Whiles you beguile the time and feed your knowledge

With viewing of the town: there shall you have me." 

Antonio in Twelfth Night, Act III