A Wonder Not Made in Vain? Reading the “Great Comet” in the Spanish World

By 1700, across Europe and the Americas, the fear of comets had become a peasant superstition and an easy laugh for stage comedies. Scholars continue to treat this shift as a major episode in the transformation of nature from a place of Divine intervention to a rule-governed in which God does not interfere. But, I argue, the rapid collapse of comet-lore had far more to do with astrological, political, and religious considerations than scientific ones. I emphasize this point by looking at regions in which the first citation of Newton or Halley did not appear until the 1730s: Spain and its American empire.

In this presentation, I explore a key moment in the transformation of beliefs about comets in Spain and the Americas, namely, the “Great Comet” of 1680. The extraordinary size of the comet prompted the publication of nearly 1200 pamphlets across Europe and the New World. Seventy-two of these were printed within the territories of the Spanish monarchy, territories often left out of narratives of the scientific revolution.

I argue that the succession of large comets before 1680, and the failure of dire effects to materialize, prompted many observers in Spain, Mexico, and Peru to ask whether God spoke to mankind in nature at all. Unlike learned treatises by theologians or mathematicians, such comet pamphlets showcase the worries of lawyers, bureaucrats, courtiers, penny astrologers, and soldiers, who articulated their beliefs with striking clarity. I analyze their arguments for and against prodigious interpretations of comets from a rhetorical and philosophical standpoint to trace a transatlantic shift. I argue that, on both sides of the Atlantic, it is religious values, especially the desire to celebrate the glory of God and raise the divine above the petty disputes of a divided Christendom, that leads to the secularization of the skies.