Eclipse and Revelation: Total Solar Eclipses in Science, History, Literature, and the Arts

Summary

Two questions guide this seven-year project: First, how can we approach the phenomenon, representation, and interpretation of total solar eclipses? Second, how can we heal the historical divide separating the natural sciences from the humanities, arts, history, music, and theology?

The result of this interdisciplinary investigation into eclipses is an exciting look behind the scenes—into labs, archives, museums, studies, around fieldwork in astronomy, meteorology, animal behaviour, and ecophysiology.

Carefully prepared for readers from all backgrounds, Eclipse & Revelation gathers the perspectives of fourteen international experts and public intellectuals representing more than two dozen fields and disciplines. Their voices invite us to imagine a liberated mode of discovery, perception, creativity, and knowledge-production across the traditional academic divisions. Didactic chapter introductions and glossaries help readers to orient themselves in each new specialty. A uniquely prismatic representation of total solar eclipses emerges, itself rising to a model of communal thinking, together, across disciplinary borders.

This book is Tom McLeish’s final project and scholarly testament. Dedicated to him and to astrophysicist Jay M. Pasachoff (contributing author of a chapter about the solar corona, also Pasachoff’s final piece of writing), the volume is a friendly companion to the chase of knowledge, encouraging its readers to embark upon their own interdisciplinary journey of discovery.

“Wonderful and wonder-full! This splendidly illustrated book explores total solar eclipses and their effect on us through art, music and words."—Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, DBE, FRS, FRSE, FRAS, FInstP; Astrophysics, University of Oxford