ABSTRACT
In 1940 a proposal was made to rename the stars: out with the dusty obscurities of antiquity-Polaris, Betelgeuse, Epsilon Ursae Majoris; in with something altogether more modern. This initiative to “make it new” came from one A.P. Herbert, a prolific if minor English modernist, a poet, satirist, author of suspense novels, member of Parliament, and general eccentric, one who shared a literary agent with W.B. Yeats. In his pamphlet A Better Sky, or, Name this Star, he discards all the exasperating Latin, Greek, and Arabic, advocating instead a scheme for renaming heavenly bodies after famous historical figures. Herbert’s scheme concentrates heavily on the literary and philosophical personnages who had come to define modernity-or, at least, had come to define an account of the development of the modern world understood from a particular mid-twentiethcentury point of view (i.e., firmly Eurocentric, male, Anglophone). Not restricting himself to individual stars, Herbert saw fit to rewrite the familiar constellations as more modern groupings: statesmen (Charlemagne, Cromwell, etc.), tyrants (Attila, Hitler), storytellers (Chaucer, Conrad), scientists (Euclid, Einstein), poets (Milton, Byron), and more, also forming geographical districts of modern nations, cities and islands, reflections of planet Earth’s own divisions. His decisions were systematic: thus the constellation Orion, long a navigational beacon, becomes “The Sailor” (Columbus, Cook). Herbert published A Better Sky as a pamphlet that included a foldout, redrawn star map.
