Constellations: Reimagining Celestial Histories in the Early Americas (Digital Catalogue, 2020)

Learning to read the skies for knowing one's place on the earth or in the Universe was an integral part of the culture of mariners who crossed the Atlantic back and forth, of writers who wanted to make sense of the relation between the Old and the New World, and of educational curricula of institutions ranging from grammar schools to universities, religious colleges, and military academies. The materials displayed in this constellation give witness to the variety of ways in which astronomical knowledge was taught and learned: navigational manuals, textbooks, treatises, dissertations, maps, or even prefatory material to books on history. Some of them were published in Europe, but found their way to the early Americas, while others were locally written, or built upon the lived experiences of their authors in the New World.

The relationship between astronomical phenomena and time-reckoning is so prominent that it is almost unnecessary to reiterate. Most calendars in the world are based on the periodic motions of the sun, the moon, or both; the date of religious festivals, particularly Christian ones, is as a rule connected to some celestial configuration; seasons and tides, the time to seed or to harvest, days of market or court, the time to sleep or to wake up — astronomical rhythms invade human life in every scale, from the most minute, intimate affairs all the way up to momentous civic, religious, and political events. The desire to predict the future, to tame time, pervaded societies across the early Americas: from knowing the date of next year's Easter day to the coming solar eclipse, through the date of a notable planetary conjunction believed to interfere in human affairs or the birthday of an influential individual, this constellation suggests the many ways through which the heavens made the future of communities in the early Americas.

Instruments for star gazing aroused awe, desire, curiosity, obsession, distrust and speculation. These fragile objects, represented in books, engaged the body, reason, memory and imagination; and they were also related with the creation of authority and strategies of legitimation in local and global contexts. Instruments were conditioned by local resources and practices, and colonial asymmetries. Astronomical practitioners living in the Americas had very conflicting attitudes towards instruments for navigation, timekeeping, geography, earthquake and meteorological predictions, as these objects were commonly linked to personal or national pride. This is not a story of the reception of European technology in the Americas, but a collage of conflicting attitudes toward instruments as found in periodicals, pamphlets, images and maps.

Astronomy was indissociable from politics in the early Americas. Just as philosophers used heavenly allegories to project the names of monarchs on to the skies, politically orchestrated observations served to create convincing representations of conquered or claimed territories. The search for longitude led to the astronomical training of captains, sailors, civil servants, and missionaries. Information gathering took different modalities: questionnaires requiring colonial administrations to record astronomical events, rival international missions financed by state and private bodies, and the establishment of observatories. The imperial impulse to measure led to increasing availability of instruments and the development of astronomical methods and, at the same time, to colonial asymmetries, rivalry and pride.

Pictures of the heavens were not just translations of visual and intellectual experience. Maps of the stars, transits of comets, lunar phases, eclipses, and the image of the Earth seen from space weighed heavily into politics, epistemic aspirations, and the economy of print. Representing the skies in the early Americas was, to a large extent, an act of reading and appropriation of images that circulated across the Atlantic through the importation of books and prints. Other experiential images from celestial observations, now lost or held in colonial archives, were created by imperial order following cosmographical instructions. The language of mathematics, geography, astrology, engraving and typography helped images travel in the service of different agendas.

Writers and readers in the early Americas loved the interlacing of celestial knowledge, fiction and poetry. Colonial libraries held dialogues and cosmic voyages that conveyed the promotion of theories, institutions and disciplines. Images of cosmic flight were also potent vehicles of political eulogies or satirical texts sent back and forth across the Atlantic. In Europe, the New World helped construct dreams of moral, philosophical or political settings in other imaginary worlds. Voyages of exploration inspired romantic narratives about astronomical discoveries that filled the market. In the Americas, these discourses were re-elaborated into poetic speculations, political satires, and allegorical personae across local print cultures.

Studying the heavens, counting time and writing history seem to be indissociable elements. However, connecting the periodic movement of celestial bodies with the passage of human experience implies a certain set of beliefs and practices that are not innate to all cultures. For the Europeans that came to the Americas from the end of the fifteenth century, the Christian calendar, which observed liturgical festivities within solar and lunar cycles, was not only a timekeeping instrument but the basis of history itself: the time of Creation and Salvation were the beginning and end of human action; so history could only be told according to the astrological and astronomical frameworks that supported the Christian calendar. Since Amerindian cultures did not share this mode of time telling, the great challenge of colonial intellectuals was to find meeting points between Indigenous and European modes of computing time and memory keeping. The division between history – related to the recording of objective happenings in agreement with astronomical time – and myth – related to collective symbolic narratives and to other forms of time computation – was created in missionary and scientific writing. For creole intellectuals, discovering the history of their nation meant recovering – or recreating – the “astronomical” knowledge of the Ancients.

Philosophical disputation about the nature of heavenly phenomena was pervasive across the early Americas. The ways and means of the debates reflected specific characteristics of the organization of colonial polities. Disputes in print were tokens of political allegiances, strategies for social mobility and accrual of prestige, reassertions or underminings of existing social orders. The works displayed in this constellation show how European philosophical traditions about the skies were not passively received and adopted by intellectuals across the Americas, but actively transformed, reinvented, rejected, and deployed in locally generated and arbitrated fights over celestial phenomena. As elsewhere, commonly accepted rhetorical norms, together with institutions such as learned academies, exerted a disciplining force over these epistemological disputes, which were themselves signs of much more widespread processes of social conflict.

The conversion of Indigenous peoples to Christianity was the ultimate ideological justification of the European invasion and colonization of the New World. Missionary activity in the early Americas not only shaped colonial societies and territories in every conceivable way, but was also directly linked to a process of world-historical importance such as the rise of the transatlantic slave trade. In their day-to-day work, Christian missionaries across the Americas resorted to their privileged knowledge of Indigenous languages and frequently employed astronomical references in order to access Indigenous people's belief systems, as some of the materials displayed in this constellation demonstrate. Conversion was not limited, however, to gaining new souls for the Christian faith, but it also meant policing the behavior and beliefs of large populations of European ancestry, who were already among the faithful. For this end, preachers and religious authors made use of remarkable celestial phenomena to inspire reverence, or to claim that the stars revealed some kind of special divine protection for the Americas.

In the early Americas as elsewhere, people reached to the skies looking for signs, answers, wonder, and solace. Infrequent and wondrous phenomena such as comets and eclipses were taken to be warnings of important, potentially calamitous events to come, of the need to repent and mend one's ways, or yet of the special protection enjoyed by a particular community. The skies mirrored and molded all too human passions, anxieties, and interests. Even more so than astronomical treatises and dissertations, the privileged sources that allow us to access these deep feelings about the heavens held by members of colonial societies across the Americas are materials such as sermons, religious books, letters, and short-form polemical works, as displayed in this constellation.