In the Sun King's Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth-Century France

by Claire Goldstein

Offering a new history of a formative cultural and political era through the cosmic phenomena that captured the public's imagination

In the winters of 1664-65 and 1680-81, the French public was galvanized by two bright comets whose elliptical orbits could not be mapped with contemporary geometry and that thus seemed to appear in random and unpredictable locations. Bookending the period during which Louis XIV's sun king mythology was...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0810148129
• ISBN13: 9780810148123
• Release Date: February 2025
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.