Today, we look up at the dark night sky and know that we are, essentially, looking into space: space as it always is, beyond the planet’s atmosphere. Equally, we know the blue day sky is merely an optical effect caused by sunlight’s interaction with this atmosphere. For centuries, however, many believed it was the other way round. The Earth was a dark planet floating in bright, typically bright blue, heavens. When did the heavens grow dark, and what happened to us in the process? While other comparable shifts—from geocentrism to heliocentrism, or a bounded to an unbounded universe—have received extensive study, the turn from bright to dark space remains almost entirely neglected. This project provides the first sustained study of this development, drawing on textual and visual evidence from antiquity to the present, and combining insights from the history of science, literary history, art history, and cultural and intellectual history at large.
The first publication emerging from this project, an article titled “Milton and the Space Age: Bright Universes, Dark Universes, and the History of the Cosmological Imagination,” is forthcoming in the Summer 2025 issue (78.2) of Renaissance Quarterly. If of interest, I am happy to share it ahead of publication; please get in touch at vbrljak@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de.