---
title: "Patronage in astronomy"
chunk: 1/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage_in_astronomy"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:37:06.257744+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Patronage in astronomy is an approach which one can use to examine the history of astronomy from a cultural standpoint. Rather than simply focusing on the findings and discoveries of individual astronomers, this approach emphasizes the importance of patronage in shaping the field of astronomy.

== Importance to the history of science ==
An often overlooked dimension in the history of science, the patronage system and the realities that existed within such a system played an important role in the lives of many of science's icons and heroes. The history of astronomy in particular is filled with examples demonstrating the relationship between patron and client, including that of Galileo Galilei and his ties to the Medici family. Many historians have begun to examine the importance of examining scientific history through this relatively forgotten lens. Dr. Robert Smith, in an article examining patronage in the early history of NASA, begins with the assertion that “the history of space astronomy is usually written from the perspective of the remarkable scientific findings garnered by space astronomers and the ways these findings have enriched and guided new views of the universe.”  But, as Barker and Goldstein ensure, “following the groundbreaking work of Robert Westman and Richard S. Westfall, historians of astronomy and historians of science in general have come to appreciate the importance of patronage in understanding the development of science during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”  As crucial as the many developments and findings of science's heroes are to the historiography of science, many historians, like Nicholas Jardine, Mario Biagioli, Richard Westfall and others, have sought to bring to light the issues of patronage within this discourse, and their works have looked to enrich the understandings of many of science's heroes, including Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Tycho Brahe amongst others. Patronage cannot provide the lone solution to understanding the social history of the Scientific Revolution, as some figures in the movement “were not sustained by patronage, and it is not yet clear how many were so supported.”  Despite this, patronage “was perhaps the most pervasive institution of preindustrial society.” 
Richard Westfall concludes:

Only now are scholars beginning to chart its course in the science of the age, and we have every reason to expect that it will prove to be very important there as well. I would like to suggest, that patronage, together with other practices that the age itself reveals to us, may be the avenue most likely to lead us into a fruitful social history of the Scientific Revolution, a movement to which the present generation of scholars has devoted itself extensively. In our investigations, it appears to me, we have allowed ourselves to be dominated excessively by concepts derived in the nineteenth century which are more applicable to that century and our own than to [the] [seventeenth] [century]... Efforts to impose them on the 17th century have appeared forced and largely barren, and I want to propose, not as a new dogmatism, but as a topic for discussion, the possibility that we need to come at the problem from a different angle, using seventeenth-century categories instead of nineteenth-century ones. Patronage was certainly a seventeenth-century category.

== What is patronage? ==
The system of patronage in 16th- and early 17th-century astronomy was different from the modern definition of patronage. The system of patronage, in the context of Astronomers such as Galileo, Kepler, and Copernicus, was a complex system of relations held between such astronomers and other individuals of high social standing.  These relations allowed for the likes of Galileo to hold positions under such powerful people as the Medici family, granting him not only increased social status due to his relations with such high social ranks, but entry into these positions also allowed for the time and monies to work on scientific endeavors. As important as these relationships were for patrons such as Galileo, for reasons of gaining monies and higher social status, clients also found importance in patronage from the reciprocal nature of the relationship. Gifts to be bestowed upon clients, such as the Medici Stars given to the Medici family by Galileo (he named Jupiter's moons after the family upon his discovery of them) gave increased social splendor and honor to the recipients of such extravagance and rarity.  The courts where these patronage relationships played out would also contribute to the “cognitive legitimation of the new science by providing venues for the social legitimation of its practitioners, and this, in turn, boosted the epistemological status of their discipline.”  Although Patronage can be explained as a system of social connections and relationships amongst social elite and practitioners of what we now umbrella under the term science, it was actually a “set of dyadic relations between patrons and clients, each of them unique… [having] no institutions and little if any formal structure. Patronage embodied no guarantees, and the “relation between patron and client was voluntary on both sides and subject always to disintegration” where past “performance counted only to the extent that it promised more in the future.” Westfall notes a “client's only claim on a patron was his capacity to illuminate further the magnificence of the man who recognized his value and encouraged him.” 

== Viewpoint of historians ==