Abstract

Works by scholars such as Keith Thomas, Ann Geneva, and Patrick Curry have demonstrated a welcome concern in the history of science with the analysis of connections between the new science and popular culture in the early modern era.i This paper further examines such interactions by delineating the perceptions in didactic literature of two ubiquitous objects of the natural world in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century England--the sun and the moon. More specifically, we will analyze solar and lunar attitudes in works of popularized astronomy and subscription newspapers from 1680 to 1720 to gauge the acceptance of scientific principles throughout early modern English society.