The Birth Date of Camões and the Eclipse of Science and Literature

The Mother of many waters, the Moon, standing between the Sun and the Earth, hindered the way of the light to the place where a woman was about to give birth to the Portuguese Bard, Luís Vaz de Camões (1524-1580). In the lunar shadow of the 23rd of January 1524, these luminaries aligned, a solar eclipse drew an astonishing ring of fire in the dim heavens, and Camões took his first breath on the planet he came to sing so remarkably. Unaware of the crown of literary glory that History of Literature would place upon him, given his eventful and somewhat star-crossed life, Camões wrote a biographical sonnet where the solar corona of this eclipse cast a darkness over him since the day he was born:

“Let the day I was born die and be gone
Forever from all time that is or was.
Let it never return or, if it does,
Let an eclipse bear down upon the sun.

Let it black out and light go on the run,
The world show signs of being about to die,
And monsters spawn and blood rain from the sky,
And mother be a stranger to her son.

Then let the people, ignorant and dazed,
Face pale in tears, ghastliness in the heart,
Reckon the world already come apart.

O timid creatures, do not be amazed
That this day of all days beheld the birth
Of the most cursèd wretch upon the earth.”

This mysterious day of light and shadow was elusive until Luciano Pereira da Silva’s historiographical gesture of searching for Camões’ specific date of birth in scientific early modern artifacts. In A Astronomia d’ Os Lusíadas (1915), Silva used early modern astronomical tables – such as those in the Almanach Perpetuum (1496), by Abraham Zacuto, and Cosmographia (1524), by Petrus Apianus – to unravel this biographical mystery. By listing the apparent positions of celestial bodies in the heavens at regular intervals, and the dates corresponding to the calculated positions of these bodies, these texts allowed astronomers to track the movements of the Sun, Moon, and planets over time, and predict celestial events such as eclipses. By crossing the information in these texts with a hermeneutic analysis of the sonnet, these texts allow historians to answer old questions such as the date of birth of Camões.

Placing the gaze of historians of science on the flickering interstice between science and literature, the conjunct reading of scientific and literary texts gives access to ideas and ways of knowing the world of a given era. Five-hundred years after the birth of Camões, it is no mystery that his opus magnum, Os Lusíadas, displays a poetic image of the scientific idea of the “machine of the world”, the intricate celestial machinery that governs the movements of the heavenly bodies according to the Ptolemaic cosmology that was then accepted. An era when cosmology and poetry were equally good ways of making sense of the universe.

Five-hundred years after, it is time to celebrate the poet, the eclipse, and the historiographical light that shines when science and literature join forces. This longstanding relation between peers is sometimes overshadowed in History, and sometimes distorted by well-meaning but misguided attempts at restoring an essential connection. [Joana Lima]