ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the consequences, both imaginative and scientific, of the telescope itself on what we might call literary responses to Galileo's observations: the lunar voyage. It begins with a review of Galileo's epochal discoveries presented in Sidereus Nuncius. It considers three distinct responses: Kepler's Conversation, Donne's Ignatius, and then conclude with a reading of Wilkins's Discovery. As such, then, part of Galileo's burden in Sidereus Nuncius is to tell the linked stories of the 'new' objects themselves and the invention of the scientific means of their discovery. In the Ptolemaic world system, underwritten by Aristotelian mechanics, the single centre of gravity around which celestial objects revolved was the earth. Galileo also addresses the matter of the moon's rotation, or cycle, around the earth and the relative age of the dark spots on the surface in relation to the lesser age of what we know as craters, among other lunar characteristics.
