Not sure if this belongs here, but....

Author: * Sokni Hvitaskald - 4 Posts on this thread out of 1,073 Posts sitewide.
Date: Jul 12, 2006 - 00:26

I found it interesting. Humanist poet for all reasons
Emma Gee
July 12, 2006

GREEK, Latin and astronomy were the sex, drugs and rock'n'roll of the 16th century. Actually, this is probably going too far. But the analogy gives us an idea of the transformative value of classics and astronomy in the Renaissance. These disciplines converge in the Scottish humanist George Buchanan (1506-82), whose quincentenary we celebrate this year.

Buchanan was mentor to the great: at one time he tutored Mary Stuart, at another James VI. His portraits present a forbidding, but perhaps not humourless figure; his letters show a wide circle of friends including the astronomer Tycho Brahe, who had a portrait of Buchanan on the wall of his study: the great astronomer observing, and observed by, the great scholar of Greek and Latin.

This is a good image for the integration of classics and astronomy in the 16th century. The renewed and open-minded study of classical literature fed into the Renaissance impulse towards exploration that also gave rise to the New Astronomy.

Although it was the fully heliocentric theory of Nicolaus Copernicus that eventually stuck, both men were working with the same paradigm, namely the universe of Aristotle and Ptolemy.

The Copernican theory emerged against a background of ancient debate. The Pythagorean model, while not strictly heliocentric, had the earth and the other planets, including the sun, moving around a stationary central fire.

There emerged from at least the third century two opposing models of the universe. One group of philosophical schools with adherence to Plato, including the Stoics, understood the world as the product of reason, whose ordering capacity was apparent in the geocentric arrangement of the heavenly bodies. The opposing tendency, represented by followers of third-century atomist philosopher Epicurus, saw the cosmos as a product of random atomic causality, acting in an infinite universe containing an infinity of worlds, lacking a centre point.

Both of these views had their poetic exponents. In antiquity, hexameter verse was the natural medium for scientific debate, because of the poet's traditional role as interpreter of the natural world.

This is why, in engaging with the debate, ancient and modern, Buchanan wrote in Latin hexameters. In his Sphera (Celestial Sphere), he criticises the theories of Copernicus and Brahe, drawing allusively on classical sources in order to place his critique in continuum with the ancient debate.

He hijacks the language of Lucretius, the Epicurean atomist poet of the first century BC, and places it in the service of the opposing world-view.

Lucretius had praised Epicurus in his De rerum natura (On the Nature of the Universe), as follows: "Therefore the lively power of the intellect conquered all, and (Epicurus) journeyed far beyond the fiery walls of the world and ranged across the whole immense space with his mind and intelligence."

Read the rest at:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,19757779-12332,00.html