Betwixt Jesuit and Enlightenment Historiography: Jean-Sylvain Bailly’s History of Indian Astronomy
The crystallization of scientific disciplines in late eighteenth-century Europe was accompanied by the proliferation of specialist histories of science. These histories were framed as much by the imperatives of the astronomy of the times as they were by the compulsions of disciplinary differentiation. This paper attempts to contextualise the engagement with the astronomy of India in the histories of astronomy authored in the eighteenth century by the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly. While Bailly’s...