Early Modern Space Travel and the English Man in the Moon
Cressy, David
The American Historical Review, Vol. III, No. 4, October (2006)
Abstract
The moon, for early modern Englishmen , was comfortingly familiar yet achingly distant. Countrymen looked to the moon, “the queen of heaven,” to understand “alterations and changes of humors, times, seasons,” and perturbations of “man’s body, the air, and all other things under her orb.” The moon and its phases helped regulate mundane activities, from the planting of crops to the letting of blood, as well as governed the washing of the tides. Lunar light facilitated nighttime journeys. Lunar features stirred the imagination. From ancient times to the age of the telescope, sky-watchers speculated about the “face in the moon” or the “man in the moon,” and occasionally wondered whether lunar eyes were looking down on them. The Roman 
Greek Plutarch (ca. 45–125) had written “of the face appearing in the roundel of the moon,” and his work was available in English by 1603. Plutarch’s moon was most likely inhabited either by creatures “light, active and nimble of body” or by “daemons” or departed souls. The poet Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) wondered, “what if within the moon’s fair shining sphere, what if in every other star unseen, of other worlds he happily should hear?” Rhetorically, for Spenser, the moon was a bridge from the newfound lands of America to the undiscovered world of “faerie land.” The new global geography and the new astronomical science of late Renaissance Europe brought fresh attention to the lunar sphere. Churchmen, philosophers, and creative writers became fascinated with the properties of the populated moon. Their earnest inquiries were sometimes tinged with merriment and scorn, and jokes about “the man in the moon” became standard early modern fare
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