Item #5338 Lunario de un siglo … contiene los aspectos principales de Sol, y Luna. Buenaventura SUÁREZ.
Lunario de un siglo … contiene los aspectos principales de Sol, y Luna.
Lunar Calculations from San Cosme y Damián, Paraguay:
“The First Astronomical Observatory in the Western Hemisphere”
Barcelona, Por Pablo Nadal Impressor, [1752].

Lunario de un siglo … contiene los aspectos principales de Sol, y Luna.

4to [19.7 x 14.7 cm], (8) ff., 196 pp., this copy with duplicate quire Z1-4 (pages 161-68) bound in, woodcut initial, headpieces, tailpieces, and borders. Bound in contemporary vellum, title in ink on spine, remnants of ties. Covers a bit dark and with minor rubbing, a few leaves with minor marginal fingersoiling and minor marginal staining, extensive contemporary inscriptions on front endpapers, ownership inscription on title page.

Rare 1752 edition (first in 1748) of the Jesuit astronomer Buenaventura Suárez’s (1679-1750) lunar ephemerides for the town of San Cosme y Damián, Paraguay, the missionary outpost where in 1706 Suárez had set up “the first astronomical observatory of the western hemisphere” (Udías, p. 58). The Lunario de un siglo (“Lunar Century”) provided 100 years of calendars (1740-1841; here data begins in 1752) charting the moon’s phases over San Cosme, a Jesuit closed mission (reducción) established on the Paraná river to serve the indigenous Guaraní people.

First using instruments of his own making (two telescopes with lenses polished from rock crystal, a pendulum clock, and a quadrant), and then working with professional equipment imported from England (2.5- and 5-meter telescopes, Martineau watches), Suárez labored for 13 years to establish the correct longitude for San Cosme, trading data on the immersion and emersion (eclipses) of Jupiter’s moons with astronomers stationed in Bejing, St. Petersburg, Lima, Madrid, and Amberg (in Bavaria). Suárez’s observations from the remote settlement at San Cosme – at first glance an eccentric location on which to center celestial calculations – at once reveal his missionary devotion and heralded an astronomical era in which the usefulness of observations would have less and less to do with proximity to urban centers: The global problem of longitude simply required accurate readings from geographically distant locations, be they taken from European capitals or from the banks of the Paraná river. While Suárez was certainly contributing to a cosmopolitan astronomical project, his ability to predict future celestial events undoubtedly carried some propagandistic power in regard to local Guaraní converts, and it should be remembered that Jesuit astronomers in China had since the early 17th-century used their scientific acumen to legitimize their spiritual ambitions.

The Lunario de un siglo devotes a two-page opening to each calendar year, with liturgical information (numerus aureus, epact, dominical letters, ember days, moveable feasts) and eclipse predictions on the verso and a table of month-by-month lunar phases on the recto. A prefatory list provides information to make temporal corrections for cities from Asunción to Canton to Stockholm. Suarez concludes the volume with “easy rules” by which a reader could extend these astronomical calculations through the year 1903.

A native of Santa Fe, in present-day Argentina, Suárez made his first eclipse observation by 1700 and quickly rose through the ecclesiastical ranks of the Society of Jesus, all the while expanding his astronomical interests. In 1731 a paper on Suárez’s Jovian work was read at London’s Royal Society, where his name appears in the lecture registers periodically over the next two decades. The Swedish astronomer Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin’s (1717-1783) praise of Suárez’s “not only outstanding, but also beautifully consistent” data is typical of the high regard in which the South American was held by his international colleagues (Asúa, p. 229).

That the Lunario was valued as a source of astronomical information in the New World is attested by annotations in the present copy written by Ignacio de Oma-Echavarría (d. 1781), “Teniente de Cosmographo Maior” and “Medidor Maior” (Chief Geographer and Surveyor) of the Viceroyalty of Peru, writing in 1773 from the city of Arequipa. Oma-Echavarría, among the highest-ranking scientific officials in Peru, added the coordinates of Arequipa and nearby villages on the volume’s flyleaf and to Suárez’s tables.

Suárez’s first lunar calculations were made for the year 1740, but the 1748 Lisbon first edition of the Lunario begins only with tables for the year 1748, a fact that has led to some confusion about the work’s earliest publication history. Anecdotal evidence suggests the existence of a now-lost edition predating the 1748 Lisbon and 1752 Barcelona editions, but such a copy has never been located, nor does one appear in any contemporary or later bibliographies. Suárez perhaps first distributed his lunar tables in manuscript form.

OCLC locates U.S. copies at Yale, Indiana, Harvard, and Brown. Only Brown holds a copy of the 1748 first edition.


* Palau 323201; Sabin 93296; Miguel de Asúa, Science in the Vanished Arcadia: Knowledge of Nature in the Jesuit Missions of Paraguay and Rio de la Plata, (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Augustín Udías, Searching the Heavens and the Earth: The History of Jesuit Observatories, (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003); Guillermo Fúrlong, El Primer Astronomo Argentino: Buenaventura Suárez, S. J., (Buenos Aires: R. Herrando, 1919).

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