Sacred Astronomy? Beyond the Stars on a Whipple Astrolabe

Abstract

It has occasionally been my privilege to act as a stand-in gallery attendant in the Whipple Museum. This has afforded precious opportunities to observe visitors, who seem not to feel my scrutiny as they explore the atmospheric main gallery. Almost invariably they wander clockwise. They may pause first at the horses’ teeth or glass fungi. But they are guaranteed to stop, and to stare, at the astrolabes case. Astrolabes seem to hold a fascination for museum visitors, even – perhaps especially – if they have no understanding of their workings. A mathematical instrument that is as beautiful as it is precise, a medieval astrolabe can be appreciated on multiple levels, scientific or artistic. This is not as anachronistic as it might appear: when they were made, too, astrolabes – at least the ones that survive in museum collections – were ornate status symbols as well as functional tools. Even so, it is often hard to imagine the contexts in which these devices were first designed and used. Behind glass, their threedimensionality and mutability obscured by the fixed presentation of one face to the observer, they may epitomise the ‘decontextualised commodities’ deplored by Ludmilla Jordanova. Even for those of us who study them, they seem to recede into mystery even as new methods of analysis allow us to get closer to them than ever before: as the newly delineated complexities of their long lives blur simple