An Annotated, Diplomatic Edition of Leonard Digges's a Prognostication of Right Good Effect Fruitfully Augmented ... of 1555
Abstract
Who would use a science text as a teaching tool in an English class? Scientific texts are abstruse. They require a kind of engagement on the part of their readers that stymies relaxation. They are not “fun”—and are we not trying to instill in our students the axiom that “Reading is an Adventure”? Many students might say that the works of fiction in the academic canon are not much fun, either, but science texts don’t even try! When I started my sophomore-level Russian Translation class as an undergraduate, I was exasperated to learn that we would be dealing primarily with science texts, at least to start out. I was an avid reader, and Chekhov in Russian sounded exciting. Expurgated papers about oxygen levels at a variety of altitudes sounded not only dull but hard. Soon, though, I began to see the sense in my professor’s syllabus. Science texts eliminate a great deal of the ambiguity that is the stock-in-trade of skilled poets and novelists. A good science writer seeks to be as clear and unambiguous as possible, exactly what first- and secondyear language students need. The point of the translation class was to focus on grammar, and science was the perfect tool. So, go ahead. Embrace the tedium. It is educational, after all. But let us not be too hasty. There is a genre of science text that moonlights in fun. Medieval and early-modern technical and scientific literature may not be Le Morte Darthur,but it is also not a typical school science textbook. These older works are quirky, full of a mysticism that seems, to our sensibilities, out of place in a text about science. Sometimes, despite the great names we all know (Bacon, Newton, Kepler), our twenty-first century perspective can lead us to some naïve assumptions that make wonderful object lessons for students of the humanities. These authors seem to modern readers to be dead wrong in sometimes amusing ways, and this view offers a springboard for teachers in a humanities classroom. We can be pulled into the texts by their exotic perspective, but when we read more closely the concepts these authors are struggling with, when we think about the resources they have to work with and the historical and cultural baggage they (like all scientists, even today) have to grapple with in order to arrive at their conclusions, we begin to appreciate that science is always contingent and, inevitably, exists in and serves cultural context. We gain an appreciation for the difficult intellectual work the writers of these texts are doing, and of the fact that we owe our current vantage to their ingenuity and insight. We begin to realize that this vantage of ours only seems lofty to us because we lack four hundred years of distance from it. Slowly an unexpected realization takes us by surprise: People are smart, and they always have been. This is the kind of insight reading in the humanities offers. And that gets us to close reading. I propose to create a curriculum for university freshmen centered around creating editions, and the early-modern scientific text is an excellent way to begin.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Johnston, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Mathematics|Astronomy|Language|Translation studies
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