This case examines Peter Kolb’s (1675-1726) expedition to obtain reliable measurements of the distance between the earth and the moon and of longitude in the Cape of Good Hope in the early 1700s. Kolb was hired by his patron, Baron Bernhard Friedrich von Krosigk, Privy Councillor to the Prussian king, to journey from Berlin to the Cape and build an astronomical observatory there. While trained as a mathematician and astronomer, various factors contributed to Kolb’s failure to deliver accurate measurements to Krosigk. Did Kolb fail at what some have called an impossible task? While Kolb’s astronomical abilities were ultimately judged failures, his patron Krosigk was praised for the potential of the ultimately failed project. The paper argues that closer scrutiny of the project’s failure shows the entanglement of various forms of knowledge and degrees of ignorance in the history of projects. Historians have typically studied projects in the context of economic and social history, such as monopolies, inventions, and various schemes promising social improvement or national enrichment. Only few have examined learned projects which also emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I propose that by exploring an astronomical project as a learned project we can shine light on the aspirations, motivations, and aims of its agents, thereby reconstructing a more expansive picture of early modern projects and projectors.

In the Enlightenment, historians claim, astrology took a unidirectional turn towards marginalization from the official knowledge maps of European elites, and became a part of popular culture. By that standard, the subject of this paper is a historical anomaly: a leading actor of the French strand of the ‘radical enlightenment’ who wrote original astrological studies and practiced the art in the highest circles of French politics. Was this enterprise doomed to historical failure? Only if we adopt an overly modernizing definition of knowledge practices, and an overly academic lack of interest in post-Enlightenment ‘popular’ knowledge.

After the death of astronomer Johannes Kepler in 1630, the fate of his manuscripts was uncertain. Initially purchased from Kepler’s heirs by astronomer Johannes Hevelius, they passed, upon Hevelius’s death, to German theologian and philosopher Michael Gottlieb Hansch. Hansch made it his life’s work to publish the complete works of Kepler; he collaborated on the project with Leibniz, and sought support from a wide range of sources, from the Emperor Charles VI to the Royal Society of London. The project was ultimately a failure, and Hansch died in poverty, having been forced to sell the majority of the manuscript collection. Yet he did publish the first volume of the project, a collection of letters to and from Kepler, and prefaced it with one of his own works: the very first biography of Kepler. This paper will explore this “failed” project, Hansch’s view of the enterprise and its importance, and the collaborations that sustained (or failed to sustain) it. It will consider Hansch’s view of Kepler himself, as articulated through the biography, and his lasting impact on Kepler’s larger legacy. Finally, it will consider the relationship between Kepler’s seventeenth-century efforts and collaborations and those of Hansch in the eighteenth century.