ABSTRACT
Tables have long been one of the principal tools through which scientists transform their experience of the natural world into tractable form. Nowhere is this more visible than in astronomy, where tabular traditions stretch back to the Babylonians of the first millennium before the common era. The origin stories of fundamental cognitive and epistemic change (orality to literacy, script to print) have been told in tabular terms, with celestial experience offering a key example of paradigmatic shift. But what expectations did celestial experts have about such formats? What were the norms by which they disciplined firsthand experience of the stars and planets into the “second nature” (Daston) of scientific investigation? Tidying records of celestial phenomena into neat columns and rows was in fact a relatively late and fluid development in print. This chapter analyzes the translation of early modern European celestial experience onto the printed page in order to reassess the deployment of tabular layouts for astronomical purposes and the conventions for presenting astronomical observations within the economy of the printed page.
