Manipulating the Sun: Picturing Astronomical Miracles from the Bible in the Early Modern Era: 13 (Nuncius)

This volume puts two biblical miracles - the Sun reversing its course in II Kings 20:8-11/Isaiah 38:8 (Horologium Ahaz) and the Sun standing still in Joshua 10:12 -, in the early modern period centre stage. We pay special attention to the development of related imagery, their role as anti-Copernican arguments (in text and image), their reception, their treatment in the mathematical sciences, and their various cultural layers, with a focus on the history of art and the history of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The material discussed spreads from rather prosaic mathematical reflections to highly appealing visual representations of the two miracles.

Julia Ellinghaus, Ph.D. (2006), art historian with a focus on iconography and Northern European art of the 17th and 18th century. Since 2018 she is research assistant at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Science and Technology Studies (IZWT) at the University of Wuppertal.

Volker R. Remmert, Ph.D. (1997), studied history and mathematics. He teaches history of science and technology at the University of Wuppertal and has been director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Science and Technology Studies (IZWT) since 2011. His research interests are in the history of early modern science and in the history of mathematics in the 19th and 20th centuries.