Alternate Name
BornMexico City, New Spain, 15 August 1645
DiedMexico City, New Spain, 22 August 1700
The foremost intellectual figure of colonial Mexico, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora was honored with the title of Royal Cosmographer by Carlos II king of Spain in 1680. He wrote on astronomy, mathematics, history, geography, and other fields. His Libra Astronomica y Philosophica (1690) includes a rational discussion of comets, the purpose of which was to allay fears inspired by the great comet C/1680 V1 and a response to Exposicion astronomica del cometa del año 1681 (1681) by Eusebio Francisco Kino S.J. that is so-called the first scientific discussion in America; the Libra, no doubt, is the masterpiece of scientific work developed by Sigüenza, where are consigned careful observations of that comet made with his “four glasses telescope” doted with a quite fine micrometer; names like Copernicus , Brahe , Descartes , Galilei , Gassendi , Kepler...
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Selected References
AA.VV. (2000). Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, homenaje 1700–2000, Alicia Mayer (coord.) pp. 392. México: UNAM.
AA.VV. (2002). Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, homenaje 1700–2000 II, Alicia Mayer (coord.), pp. 320. México: UNAM.
Burrus, S. J. and Ernest, J. (1953). “Sigüenza y Góngora’s efforts for readmission into the Jesuit order”, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 33, num. 3, pp. 387–391.
Burrus, S. J. and Ernest, J. (1959). “Clavijero and the lost Sigüenza y Góngora manuscripts”, Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl, vol. 1, pp. 59–90.
Leonard, Irving A. (1929). Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora: A Mexican Savant of the Seventeenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ross, Kathleen (1993). The Baroque Narrative of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora: A New World Paradise. Cambridge Studies in Latin American and Iberian Literature num. 9, pp. 220. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de (1690). Libra Astronomica y Philosophica. México: Imprenta de los Herederos de la Viuda de Bernardo Calderon. Exist a modern edition (1984) in the Nueva Biblioteca Mexicana n.- 2 by UNAM, and other in the volume titled Seis Obras from Biblioteca Ayacucho, Caracas (1984).
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de Alba Martínez, D.J. (2014). Siguenza y Góngora, Carlos. In: Hockey, T., et al. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_1278
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