Speaker
Description
In this paper, I would like to analyse Copernicus' legacy by using two dissimilar texts which conceal a continuity far greater than one might think, namely Galileo Galilei's Sidereus Nuncius and The Other World: States and Empires of the Moon by Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac. After considering the Sidereus Nuncius as a manifesto of the scientific method, I will stress the similarity between the now defective lunar body and the Earth, which led to the cosmological literature developed during the Seventeenth century that will bring man to an inhabited Moon, in a fictional yet verisimilar reality. The man of the Seventeenth-century is now able to ask himself a profound question: if the Moon is now a demonstrated defective world such as Earth, why should it not be possible for humankind to reach it?
I will call into question the text by Cyrano de Bergerac as a distinctive specimen: by describing the vicissitudes of the protagonist in the Other World, I will bring to the surface its peculiar aspects, corroborated by his undeniable adherence to the Galilean discoveries and the Copernican system, siding against the orthodoxy of the Catholic Church. I will conclude this paper by stressing the role of cosmological literature as one of the greatest but underestimated tools that helped spread the news of the Copernican innovations.
