BOOK

Dante and the early astronomer : science, adventure, and a Victorian woman who opened the heavens

Daugherty, Tracy, author

2019

Overview

In 1910, Mary Acworth Evershed (1867-1949) sat on a hill in southern India staring at the moon as she grappled with apparent mistakes in Dante's Divine Comedy. Was Dante's astronomy unintelligible? Or was he, for a man of his time and place, as insightful as one could be about the sky? As the twentieth century began, women who wished to become professional astronomers faced difficult cultural barriers, but Evershed joined the British Astronomical Association and, from an Indian observatory, became an experienced observer of sunspots, solar eclipses, and variable stars. From the perspective of one remarkable amateur astronomer, readers will see how ideas developed during Galileo's time evolved or were discarded in Newtonian conceptions of the cosmos and recast in Einstein's theories. The result is a book about the history of science but also a poetic meditation on literature, science, and the evolution of ideas.-- Source other than Library of Congress.

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Subject: Evershed, Mary Acworth, 1867-1949. / Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321 Influence. / Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321. / Women astronomers England Biography. / Astronomers England Biography. / Amateur astronomy England History. / Astronomy England History. / Amateur astronomy. / Astronomy. / Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) / Women astronomers. / England.
• ISBN: 9780300239898, 0300239890

Item info:

1 item available

1 item total in all locations

Holdings :

Call Number	Copies	Material	Location
QB36.E94 D38 2019	1	BOOK	GENERAL