Bookshelf

Alumni and faculty members who would like to have their books considered for this listing should contact Stacey Himmelberger, editor of Hamilton magazine. This list, which dates back to 2018, is updated periodically with books appearing alphabetically on the date of entry.

In the Sun King’s Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth-Century France by Claire Goldstein ’94

March 20, 2025

Tags Alumni Book

(Northwestern University Press, 2025)

A study of how unusually bright comets appeared not only in the sky in 1664-65 and 1680-81, but also in ballets and theater, letters and journalism, architecture and institutions, theology and literary style. The author, a French literature and culture professor at the University of California Davis, discusses how these comets — considered at the time to appear in random and unpredictable locations — sparked curiosity, scrutiny, resistance, and doubt regarding the epistemological status of observation.

“Bookending the period during which Louis XIV’s sun king mythology was created, these comets defied the heliocentric order to which French politics and culture aspired. As Claire Goldstein demonstrates, literary texts, cultural institutions, and architecture inspired by comets offer a different perspective on the relationship between sensory experience, ideology, and artistic form,” the publisher notes.