[ATHENA] Prochaine séance du séminaire d'histoire des sciences astronomiques

[Martina Schiavon <martina.schiavon AT univ-lorraine.fr>]

Chères et chers collègues,

 

La prochaine séance du séminaire d’histoire des sciences astronomiques aura lieu dans la Salle du Conseil de l’Observatoire de Paris le mardi 13 février 2024, à 14h (heure de Paris).

Nous aurons le plaisir d’entendre Giorgio Matteoli sur :

"The Long Pre-History of Lalande’s Bibliographie astronomique".

 Vous pouvez lire son résumé à la fin de ce message.

 

Voici le lien zoom :

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86417271362?pwd=SGtpQTJ2Vzh5U0xVZFh2eW1DZWJjZz09

Pour celles et ceux qui veulent se rendre sur place, les inscriptions peuvent se faire auprès de Christophe Schmit (christophe.schmit AT obspm.fr), au plus tard le lundi 12 février (matinée) ; il n’y aura pas besoin d’inscription pour le zoom.

 

Pour rappel, le séminaire d’histoire des sciences astronomiques est le fruit d’une collaboration entre le Centre François Viète (UR 1161, Université de Nantes et Université de Bretagne occidentale), les Archives Henri-Poincaré - Philosophie et Recherches sur les Sciences et les Technologies (UMR 7117 du CNRS, de l’Université de Lorraine, de l’Université de Strasbourg), le Bureau des longitudes, la Bibliothèque de l’Observatoire de Paris et le laboratoire SYRTE - Systèmes de Référence Temps-Espace (UMR 8630 du CNRS, de l’Observatoire de Paris - Université PSL, de Sorbonne Université et du LNE). Vous trouverez d’autres informations ainsi que le programme des séminaires à cette adresse (les salles y sont systématiquement indiquées pour chaque séance du séminaire) : 

https://syrte.obspm.fr/spip/science/histoire/seminaires-et-colloques/seminaire-d-histoire-des-sciences-astronomiques/

Bien cordialement,

Martina Schiavon (pour le comité d’organisation)

 

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Martina SCHIAVON

Enseignante-chercheuse (MCF) - HDR en Histoire des sciences et des techniques

Université de Lorraine

E-mail : Martina.Schiavon AT univ-lorraine.fr

http://poincare.univ-lorraine.fr/fr/membre-titulaire/martina-schiavon

 

Giorgio Matteoli RÉSUMÉ :

 

When Jérôme de Lalande published his Bibliographie astronomique in 1803, he stood at the apex of his career. As one of the most influent astronomers in Europe, he was well aware of the implicit power wielded by histories and bibliographies of a discipline such as astronomy, especially in an age when the production of such works remained relatively scarce – namely, that of presenting and organizing the past of the discipline by separating the chaff from the wheat to be fed to new generations of increasingly professionalized astronomers. Indeed, as Lalande himself recognizes in the preface to his work, it was the Ministry of Public Instruction who provided the means to carry out his enterprise; and that is why «mere erudition» and «completeness» were never his objectives, for they would have rendered his book a «simple waste of time». However, Lalande did not start accumulating data from scratch. He could rely on a long lineage of direct predecessor who had been accumulating bibliographical materials in the previous two centuries, within the same State-driven economy of astronomical knowledge. As I will show on the basis of recent archival research, it was Giovanni Domenico Cassini who, at the end of the XVII century, started organizing astronomical materials in his capacity of chief scientific administrator for the Parisian Academy of Sciences. Later, his pupil Joseph-Nicolas Delisle resumed this project from where it was left, putting it on an entirely new footing. He soon started to involve other scholars from all over Europe to help gathering the information he needed; sometimes, he even commissioned others (like the Wittenberg wolffian scholar Johann Friedrich Weidler) to complete some its parts. Even though Delisle’s work was ultimately left unaccomplished, his pupil Lalande took it up once again and extensively deployed it in compiling his Bibliographie, thereby embedding it in the wider structure of the Ancient Régime’s political epistemology of astronomy..