After Hours with Flamsteed's Burned Star Atlas

This program will be presented virtually via Zoom webinar. Register Here.

In 1716, British astronomer John Flamsteed built a pyre near the Royal Observatory. On it, he burned pages from a book he wrote as a “sacrifice to truth.” The pages were from the 1712 edition of Flamsteed’s Historiae coelestis, which Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley had printed despite Flamsteed’s vehement objections.

What happened after the fire? How did copies of Historiae coelestis spread, and who circulated them? Not all the offending pages went up in flames. Flamsteed kept a few copies of the objectionable sections. In one copy, recently acquired by the Linda Hall Library, Flamsteed and his assistant took pen to paper in pursuit of truth: striking through, crossing out, and annotating Newton and Halley’s mistakes.

Join scholar Emma Hill and the Library’s Vice President for Special Collections and Public Services Jason W. Dean as they introduce Hill’s census of surviving copies and discuss how the census has uncovered new information about the book’s production and the human story surrounding it.

Speakers:

Emma Hill is a UK-based independent scholar dedicated to creating a comprehensive census of John Flamsteed’s Historia Coelestis Libri Duo (1712). She holds a BA (Hons) in History of Art and an MA in Eighteenth Century Studies, both from the University of York. Until recently, Emma was pursuing a PhD at the University of Kent, where she initiated her work on the Flamsteed census.

Jason W. Dean is the Library’s Vice President for Collections & Public Services. He has previously held positions at the University of Arkansas and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. He earned an undergraduate degree in history from Hardin-Simmons University and his MS in Library and Information Science from Syracuse University. Jason’s areas of research interest include descriptive and analytical bibliographical examinations of the works of Galileo and Newton, American color printing, and the life and work of S. Fred Prince.