In the Sun King's Cosmos
Book • 2025
Claire Goldstein's In the Sun King's Cosmos examines responses to two seventeenth-century comets (1664–65 and 1680–81) across literature, performance, periodicals, and institutions in France.
The book situates comet sightings within cultural practices and political iconography during Louis XIV's reign, exploring tensions between popular attention to comets and the monarchy's heliocentric imagery.
Goldstein analyzes ephemeral texts, ballets, plays, journals, and the founding of the Paris Observatory to reveal how comets provoked social spectacle, scientific exchange, and narrative play.
She emphasizes fictionality and the emergence of novelistic modes in texts like Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle's and Gilles de Roberval-related writings, showing how comets illuminated practices of circulation, credit, and authority.
The study links sensory experience and material culture to broader questions about knowledge production and state power in the grand siècle.
The book situates comet sightings within cultural practices and political iconography during Louis XIV's reign, exploring tensions between popular attention to comets and the monarchy's heliocentric imagery.
Goldstein analyzes ephemeral texts, ballets, plays, journals, and the founding of the Paris Observatory to reveal how comets provoked social spectacle, scientific exchange, and narrative play.
She emphasizes fictionality and the emergence of novelistic modes in texts like Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle's and Gilles de Roberval-related writings, showing how comets illuminated practices of circulation, credit, and authority.
The study links sensory experience and material culture to broader questions about knowledge production and state power in the grand siècle.
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Gina Stahm
Claire Goldstein, "Sun King's Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth-Century France" (Northwestern UP, 2025)
