Part 2. "The Moon takes up the wondrous tale" *

Galileo's first refracting telescope, in the Museo Galileo, Florence

The early telescopes were not perfect.  When  a founder member of the Royal Society,  Sir Paul Neale (or Neile) enthusiastically claimed to see a giant elephant on the Moon, it proved to be a mouse which had crept in between the tubes, along with gnats and insects, which were interpreted as Lilliputian armies.   These Royal Society virtuosi were duly mocked by Samuel Butler as:

 "learned men who greedily pursue,

Things that are rather wonderful than true."

He attacked their aims and their methods as they

"... grew distracted, whether to espouse,

The party of the Elephant or Mouse.

 Some held there was no way so orthodox

As to refer it to the ballot box".*

Samuel Butler, The Elephant in the Moon, c. 1670

Fortunately sense and the empirical method prevailed, and the telescope was taken apart to reveal the mouse.   [Maybe our politicians today should read Butler's poem.]

The early lunar romances were popular with the educated.  Before Bishop Godwin's flying swans, Ariosto in his Orlando Furioso, 1532, sends his hero, Astolfo, a knight of Charlemagne, flying around on a hippogriff, half eagle and half horse (as described in Virgil).

Contemporary wood engraving with hippogriff  for "Orlando Furioso",  (wikimedia commons)

Reaching Paradise, Astolfo is then sent to the Moon in Old Testament Elijah's flaming chariot, where he discovers mad Orlando's lost wits, for according to myth, everything lost or wasted on earth is found on the moon.  How prescient were these writers from antiquity?

The twentieth century American novelist, Herman Wouk, wrote a strange little Utopian journey to the moon in The Lomokome Papers in 1949.  A US. Naval astronaut crash-lands and is captured and taken down to a subterranean (sublunar?) world.  The story is pieced together from fragments of his log, found near the crash site, interspersed with sections of government reports of their findings.

As in other Utopias, the hero discovers the failings of the Lomokome system:  -- "All the Hydrogen Belongs to All the People" -- and their chilling Law of Reasonable War and Death Day, which "reduces a foolishly chaotic arrangement, which threatens our total destruction, to a sane, safe, workable process".

The Lomokome Papers, with haunting illustrations by Harry Bennett  

1968 edition © Herman Wouk

Interestingly, by 1967 Wouk is "sobered by the speed with which truth is overtaking my grim fiction", but thought that, "the moon voyage as a literary form, approaches total eclipse".

1956 Film Poster  (wikimedia commons)

Where it has blossomed of course is on the screen, whether based on existing novels, or created by directors and authors now writing screenplays.  The Forbidden Planet, of 1956, based by its original writers Irving Block and Allen Adler on Shakespeare's The Tempest, is regarded as the forerunner of the genre, which took off in the 1960s with many notable films and TV series.  

To mention just two, 1968 sees Kubrick's unforgettable 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on a story by Arthur C. Clarke: 

Film still from Stanley Kubrick's  "2001: a Space Odyssey" (wikimedia commons)

and perhaps my favourite -- Silent Running, in 1972:

Film still from "Silent Running", with Bruce Dern and Huey,  1972 (wikimedia commons)

* from Joseph Addison's hymn, 1712

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.

  

May Labours: "Grass and greenworld all together"*

Here is the month of May from one of my favourite Calendars of the Months, a roundel from the ceiling of Piero de Medici's private study, where he kept his treasures.

May labours:  glazed terracotta ceiling decoration by Luca della Robbia, 1456  Florence. 

©  V& A Museum

Piero commissioned the leading fashionable sculptor, Luca della Robbia, to decorate the ceiling with 12 coloured enamel plaques showing the agricultural labours for each month (the purple and green vestiges are the colours of Piero's livery).   The images are thought to be based on the classic Latin farmers' encyclopaedia (in 12 volumes) De Res Rustica, by Columella (AD 4 - c. AD 74)  which was listed in Piero's library inventory.  As well as showing the monthly task -  here the cutting of the spring grass in May - each calendar roundel indicates the month's average hours of daylight, in pale blue, and the phases of the moon, so important for planting.  

Above the head of the sun is the zodiac sign for Gemini, the classical twins,  the constellation of Castor and Pollux. The zodiac signs are commonly linked with the monthly labours, together representing the earthly and the heavenly cycle of the year.

The ceramic roundels are finely painted, but Piero's calendar is secular and eminently practical.  This was a time of transition when new printed books were embellished with hand painted illustrations.  Piero also commissioned illuminated manuscripts, and his library would have included devotional Books of Hours.   The other traditional image used for the May Calendar page, especially for noble patrons, were scenes of falconry and its associated pleasures of courtly dalliance.  This contemporary Arras tapestry illustrates both of these sports being enjoyed by the wealthy:

"Falconry":   Devonshire Hunting Tapestry, Arras c. 1430  

© V & A Museum

Central detail from "Falconry"
© V&A Museum

Detail from "Falconry" (top left corner) 

© V&A Museum

In Anglo-Saxon manuscript Psalters, calendar pages for May also celebrate the spring grass, with shepherds tending their flocks.  In the same vein is this May page from the Tiberius Miscellany of the eleventh century; a general knowledge collection, the manuscript included history and astronomy as well as monthly calendars.  So it seems that these early medieval texts, whether devotional or practical,  combined the seasonal labours with Christian imagery in their illuminations.

MS. Cotton Tiberius B. c. 1040   © British Library

* from "The May Magnificat"   G. M Hopkins

Sagittarius: the Archer

The Fair Toxophilites   William Powell Frith 1872

© Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter

It was Roger Ascham, tutor and later secretary to Queen Elizabeth I,  who coined the word "toxophily".  In 1545 he published his treatise on archery -- "Toxophilus", -- from toxon, the Greek word for bow, rather than the Latin arcus. His book takes the form of a debate between Philologus, the scholar, and Toxophilus the archer, on the respective virtues of learning versus shooting.  Toxophilus is clearly no mean scholar himself, drawing on as many classical writers - Plato, Aristotle, Hesiod and more - as the book-loving Philologus.  This was the first handbook on archery written in English, and Ascham's dialogue format was soon copied by other writers, including Izaak Walton in his Compleat Angler in 1653.

the Moon goddess, late 17th century engraving

The constellation of Sagittarius takes its name from the Latin for arrow, sagitta, and is often portrayed (as above) as a centaur, that half-man, half-horse beast from Greek mythology;   although it is perhaps that other archer,  Cupid, who is the more popular figure in western art and literature.

"With what sad steps, O Moon! thou climb'st the skies!

How silently! and with how wan a face!

What! may it be that even in heavenly place

That busy archer his sharp arrows tries?"

Sonnet 31, Astrophel and Stella  Sir Philip Sidney

Amergin

"I am the wind which breathes upon the sea,
I am the wave of the ocean,
I am the murmur of the billows,
I am the ox of the seven combats,
I am the vulture upon the rocks,
I am a beam of the sun,
I am the fairest of plants,
I am a wild boar in valour,
I am a salmon in the water,
I am a lake in the plain,
I am a word of science,
I am the point of the lance in battle,
I am the God who creates in the head the fire.
Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountain?
Who announces the ages of the moon?
Who teaches the place where couches the sun?"

Amergin, quoted in The White Goddess,  Robert Graves

A lunar calendar

"The grandfather clock is an enemy telling me that death runs at my heels.  The clock has a painted face picturing the four seasons; Spring, a child on a sheep-covered hill; Summer, a girl big with child raking hay in a shining meadow; Autumn, a woman blown before a tempest; Winter, an old man with a red face pushing sticks into a fire under a cooking pot slung from a tripod.  There is a painted moon behind, that moves with the days of the month."

Tide-race  Brenda Chamberlain