Copernicus’s cosmology displaced the female earth for a masculine sun

Evidence

Contributing to the sense of sickness and decay in the organic order of nature were the discoveries of the “new science.” The old hierarchical structure of the macrocosm had been disrupted by the cosmology of Nicolaus Copernicus, published in 1543, which advanced the heliocentric hypothesis and challenged the Ptolemaic geocentric model of the universe. As Bernard Fontenelle perceived later in his Plurality of Worlds (1686), Copernicus displaced the female earth from the center of the cosmos and replaced it with the masculine sun. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 539

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The female earth was central to premodern organic cosmology — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 61; Premodern thinkers conceived the cosmos as a living male-female animal — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 449; Neoplatonic cosmology retained a female world-soul as the source of natural motion — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 458 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Mechanism killed the female world-soul by reducing nature to dead moving corpuscles #corroborates (0.85) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 766
• Pythagorean cosmology provided the conceptual leap toward the Copernican hypothesis. #qualifies (0.78) — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 900
• Galileo’s observations challenged the Earth-centered universe model. #contradicts (0.75) — Hawking, Stephen, A Brief History of Time, 18