History professor Richard Kremer has a bit of a strange hobby. In his free time, he tries to identify the anonymous astronomers of the past using medieval book-bindings to peer into the mathematics of preceding centuries.
Kremer's research focuses on a 700-year period in astronomy between the work of the ancient Greeks and Copernicus. Scholars know that astronomers lived during this period, but there are very large gaps in this crucial data.
"I am interested in the foundation of astrology, which is mathematical astronomy," Kremer said. "It was complicated math that was compiled into tables. I study how the astronomers made the tables."
Several clues in the mystery surrounding these scientists are inherent in the calendars of the time, because these calendars were based on astronomy. Kremer uses mathematical modeling in an attempt to date these calendars in order to learn more about the science of the time.
Finding 15th century calendars may appear daunting, but Kremer has identified an unusual source: book-bindings. In medieval times, Kremer explained, old calendars and other scrap papers were used to fashion part of books' spines.
"Scholars are constantly finding new calendars to date," Kremer said. "We find new ones as people restore the bindings of old books. Usually the dates are cut off, but with a couple months [of a calendar] I can use my laptop to calculate what year the calendar is from."
This research, which Kremer refers to as "historical detective work", has proved relevant to several areas in academia, including controversy in the printing world about when Guttenberg began printing, the study of numeracy (the role of numbers in society) and to help put a name on the once anonymous astronomers.
"This is my universe," Kremer said. "I like to think of it as bottom-up history. I start with mostly anonymous astrologers to figure out how they did these advanced computations to perform their astrology."
Kremer has analyzed over 500 of these calendars, which were primarily used in the fifteenth century by doctors for scheduling bloodlettings and by Christians to mark their holy days. He has worked closely with a colleague in Germany to assess the data.
Kremer is in the process of writing a book to formally introduce his findings.
"Right now I am opening an old can of worms," he said. "I am challenging the basic chronology of printing and print scholars find that controversial. I offer no solutions to this problem, but I merely show that the current explanation doesn't hold up."
Kremer received his bachelor's degree from Goshen College in Indiana, where he "stumbled upon" his passion for historical science. After Kremer completed his physics degree in two years he did not have enough credits to graduate and needed something to occupy his time.
"It just so happened my physics teacher played tennis with a history professor," Kremer said, of discovering his second major.
Kremer continued his education at Harvard University where he earned both his masters and Ph.D in historical sciences. After graduating, he taught at the University of New Hampshire before starting at Dartmouth in 1985.
