ABSTRACT
Long before the ancient Greeks, and pervasively across cultures ever since, cosmology has been understood as both that branch of astronomy concerned with the origins, properties, structure and evolution of the physical universe and as the narrative description of such a world view, in Dennis Danielson’s words: “discourse concerned with the cosmos and with cosmic questions.”1 Throughout human history, cosmology has been produced by many different creative and intellectual endeavors and has been made manifest in many different forms: mythopoetic stories and legends, magicosuperstitious beliefs and rituals, art and artifacts, architectural designs and buildings, religious revelation; metaphysical and natural philosophical speculation; natural history, poetic and literary description, geometric and mechanical modeling; mathematical, dynamical and psychological analysis; naked-eye and telescopic observation, pictorial depiction, photographic and scientific instrumental imaging and animation. Hardy was born into a culture in which virtually all of these forms contributed to and counted as cosmology – a space and time where poets, philosophers, and novelists as well as astronomers, geologists, and naturalists read and composed cosmological narratives.
