Essay Review: The History and Reception of Copernicus's de Revolutionibus : An Annotated Census of Copernicus' De Revolutionibus (Nuremberg,1543 and Basel,1566)

The mainstream interest in annotation is reflected in works such as Virginia Stern's Gabriel Harvey: His life, marginalia and library (Oxford, 1979) and Heather Jackson's Marginalia: Readers writing in books (New Haven and London, 2001). Works of particular interest to historians of science that discuss marginalia and “commonplace” notebooks include William Sherman's John Dee: The politics of reading and writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst, 1995) and Anne Blair's The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance science (Princeton, 1997). “Dog-earing” was a favoured technique of Isaac Newton's, as discussed in John Harrison's The library of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1978), 25–26; he was also a keen annotator and notebook compiler, and the role that understanding his reading practices can play in understanding his thought is evident in a work such as Betty Jo Teeter Dobb's The Janus faces of genius: The role of alchemy in Newton's thought (Cambridge, 1991). A recent work in the history of science that demonstrates the value of studying the reception of a text is James Secord's Victorian sensation: The extraordinary publication, reception, and secret authorship of Vestiges of the natural history of Creation (Chicago and London, 2000).

The communications circuit is described by Robert Darnton in “What is the history of books?”, Daedalus , cxi/3 (1982), 65–83; the article has been reprinted in his The kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in cultural history (London, 1990), 107–35, and in Finkelstein D. McCleery A. , The book history reader (London, 2002), 9–26.

Elizabeth Eisenstein , The printing press as an agent of change (Cambridge, 1979), especially chap. 2, “Defining the initial shift: Some features of print culture”, 43–159.

On the value of the convergence, see Adrian Johns , “Science and the book in modern cultural historiography”, Studies in the history and philosophy of science , xxix (1998), 167–94 and the introduction to Nicholas Jardine Marina Frasca-Spada (eds), Books and the sciences in history (Cambridge, 2000), 1–12.

I would include here Anthony Grafton , who has written on Kepler as a reader, and whose work has encompassed studies of the astronomically-dependent disciplines of astrology and chronology. See, inter alia, his Joseph Scaliger: A study in the history of classical scholarship , ii: Historical chronology (Oxford, 1993); “Johannes Kepler: The new astronomer reads ancient texts”, in his Commerce with the classics: Ancient books and Renaissance readers (Ann Arbor, 1997), 185–224; and Cardano's cosmos: The world and works of a Renaissance astrologer (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). Nicholas Jardine , who in collaboration with Alain Segonds has also published on Kepler's reading practice, and who has edited with Marina Frasca-Spada a collection of essays on the history of the sciences and the book, op. cit. (ref. 4), also deserves to be mentioned; see Jardine Alain Segonds , “Kepler as a reader and translator of Aristotle”, in Constance Blackwell Sachiko Kusukawa (eds), Philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Conversations with Aristotle (Aldershot, 1999), 206–233. Finally, I would single out Adrian Johns , whose writing on the history of the book, conceived in part as a critique of Elisabeth Eisenstein, has included a treatment of Flamsteed's Historia coelestis; see his The nature of the book: Print and knowledge in the making (Chicago, 1998), 543–621.

The length of interest in Copernicus's marginalia was noted by Jerzy Dobrzycki in “The Uppsala notes”, Studia copernicana , xiii (1975), 161–7, p. 161. The reference is to Leopold Prowe's Mittheilungen aus Schwedischen Archiven und Bibliotheken (Berlin, 1853), the third section of the first part of which, pp. 10–15, is “Angabe der zu Uppsala aufbewahrten Bücher, die einst im Besitze von Copernicus gewesen”.

These episodes are treated in the standard biographies: Ernst Zinner's Leben und Wirken des J. Müller von Königsberg gennant Regiomontanus , 2nd edn (Osnabrück, 1968), Victor Thoren's The Lord of Uraniborg: A biography of Tycho Brahe (Cambridge, 1990), and Max Caspar's Kepler, translated by Hellmann Doris C. with a new introduction and references by Owen Gingerich and biographical citations by Owen Gingerich and Alain Segonds (New York, 1993). Some have also featured in more specialized literature, such as Olaf Pedersen , “The decline and fall of the Theorica Planetarum: Renaissance astronomy and the art of printing”, Studia copernicana , xvi (1978), 157–85, Angelika Wingen-Trennhaus , “Regiomontanus als Frühdrucker in Nürnberg”, Mitteilungen des Vereins für die Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg , lxxviii (1991), 17–87, and Lauritz Nielsen , Tycho Brahes Bogtrykkeri (Copenhagen, 1946). It is perhaps worth noting that Tycho's printing enterprise has been one locus of disagreement between Elisabeth Eisenstein Adrian Johns : See Eisenstein , op. cit. (ref. 3), especially pp. 575–635, and Johns , op. cit. (ref. 4), pp. 11–19. My own view, based on reading Tycho's extant correspondence, is that both their accounts of his publishing aspirations and achievements are wide of the mark; see chap. 3 of my unpublished Ph.D. thesis, “Bearing the heavens: Astronomers, instruments, and the communication of astronomy in early-modern Europe, Cambridge University, 2000.

See Owen Gingerich , “An early tradition of an extended errata list for Copernicus's De revolutionibus”, Journal for the history of astronomy , xii (1981), 47–52; “A reattribution of the Tychonic annotations in copies of Copernicus's De revolutionibus” (with Robert Westman ), ibid. , xii (1981), 53–54; “The censorship of Copernicus' De revolutionibus”, Annali dell' Instituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze , vi/2 (1981), 45–61; “A Tusi couple from Schöner's De revolutionibus?”, Journal for the history of astronomy , xv (1984), 128–33; “The Wittich connection: Conflict and priority in late sixteenth-century cosmology” (with Robert Westman ), Transactions of the American Philosophical Society , lxxviii/7 (1988); “The Master of the 1550 radices: Jofrancus Offusius” (with Jerzy Dobrzycki ), Journal for the history of astronomy , xxxiv (1993), 235–253; “Introduction to Copernicus' ‘De revolutionibus’”, in Ute Müller (ed.), 450 Jahre Copernicus “De revolutionibus”: Astronomische und mathematische Bücher aus Schweinfürter Bibliotheken (Schweinfurt, 1993), 19–22; and “Mästlin's, Kepler's and Schickard's copies of De revolutionibus”, in Seck F. (ed.), Zum 400. Geburtstag von Wilhelm Schickard (Sigmaringen, 1995), 167–83.

Owen Gingerich , “The great Copernicus chase”, originally published in American scholar , xxxxix (1979), 81–88; reprinted in The great Copernicus chase and other adventures in astronomical history (Cambridge, 1992), 69–81.

Census I.217. For the initial attribution of the annotations in this copy to Erasmus Reinhold, see Gingerich O. , “The role of Erasmus Reinhold and the Prutenic Tables in the dissemination of Copernican Theory”, Studia copernicana , vi (1973), 56. Some of the Rheinholdian annotations were, of course, discussed in depth in Gingerich Westman , “The Wittich connection” (ref. 8), but those not concerned with planetary models were not treated in any detail.

See Gingerich , “The great Copernicus chase” (ref. 8), in the reprinted version; the original article was written before the second copy of the Camerarius poem came to light.

Gingerich , “The great Copernicus chase” (ref. 8), p. 72 in the reprinted version.

On the preface, and its assertion that “Mathemata mathematicis scribuntur”, see Westman R. , “Proof, poetics, and patronage: Copernicus' preface to De revolutionibus”, in David Lindberg Robert Westman , Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, 1990), 167–205.

The phenomenon is also illustrated by Edward Rosen's Three Imperial Mathematicians: Kepler trapped Between Tycho and Ursus (New York, 1986) and Nicholas Jardine's The birth of history and philosophy of science: Kepler's A defence of Tycho against Ursus with essays on its provenance and significance, corrected edn (Cambridge, 1988), chaps. 1–3, and discussed in my “Astronomical books and courtly communication”, in Frasca-Spada Jardine (eds.), Books and the sciences in history , (ref. 4), 114–31.

Op. cit. (ref. 8).

Subsequent work by Robert Goulding offers further support for this view, at the same time as it moderates some of the conclusions and speculations in The Wittich connection; see “Henry Savile and the Tychonic world-system”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes , lviii (1995), 152–79.

Census II.75.

Census I.104.

Census I.90.

Census II.169.

Census II.172. I am not entirely persuaded, however, by Gingerich's argument that, since this copy contains several worked out examples using the height of the pole as 52°, the owner worked in Kassel and was associated with Wilhelm of Hesse as well as Paul Wittich. The observers at Kassel had consistently determined their latitude to be between 51°14′ and 51°20′, and hence closer to 51° than 52°, from 1561 onwards; see Jürgen Hamel , Die astronomischen Forschungen in Kassel unter Wilhelm IV (Thun and Frankfurt am Main, 1998), 25. An individual working from a printed source might have taken the latitude of Kassel to be 52° for the purpose of calculation: The 1583 edition of Apian's Cosmographiae gives the value of 51°30′, but it also identifies the town with Ptolemy's Stereontium, which was assigned 52°20′ in the Geography, according to Edward Stevenson's translation (New York, 1932; reprinted New York, 1991), 64. (The Basle, 1552 edition of the Geography, however, has 52°10′ — see p. 24 — and systematic checks of other editions of these texts, or other printed sources, would likely uncover further variations.) It is far from clear, however, why the same round value could not have been assumed for other European centres.

Census I.156.

“lineam meridianam optime designabis si in propositum planum gnomonum perpendiculariter erexeris, eiusque duas umbras ante et post meridiem aequales observaveris, mediamque lineam secueris, quae umbrarum terminos iungit, linea a sectione ad gnomonis basim est meridionalis: Ut dicit ipse author”; annotation to f. 28v of Census I.156. In transcribing this and the following annotations, conventional contractions have been expanded silently except in cases of potential ambiguity.

“in illud planum s[cilicet] aquam, vel globum imponendo, quam in neutram partem, prae altera debent divolvi”; annotation to f. 28v of Census I.156.

“ne s(cilicet] detorqueante, nam alioqui quo sunt tenuiores eo sunt exactiores”; annotation to f. 45r of Census I.156.

“quemadmodum aptare solent in globis etiam conficiendis aptare [sic] meridianam in horizontem, sed hoc interest quod hi circuli, sint construi firmiter”; annotation to f. 45r of Census I.156.

Census II.23.

Census I.21, I.52, and II.59.

Census II.62.

Census I.125, I.205, and II.256.

Census II.52 and II.98.

Census I.99 and I.173. On Thomaz, see William Wallace , “The ‘Calculatores’ in early sixteenth-century physics”, The British journal for the history of science , iv (1969), 221–33, especially p. 224, and his article in the Dictionary of scientific biography , xiii, 349–50.

Census I.202. The crucial passage is the fifth line of Psalm 104, which in the King James version describes the Lord, “Who laid the foundations of the Earth, that it should not be moved forever”. This copy, held by Eton College, is bound with several other texts, with the Parmenius and one other carrying the signature of Thomas Savile , Henry Savile's brother.

Census I.94.

Second-editions: II.157 and II.204.

Census I.53, I.72, I.84, I.95, I.113, I.127, I.134, I.136, I.193, I.205, II.28, II.201, II.205, and II.210. Some of these copies are bound with texts over and above the Epitome, including I.127, whose pattern of waterstaining, as described by Gingerich , makes it less likely that the current combination of texts is original. Against this, however, could be set the copy of the Epitome and De revolutionibus which belonged to Landgrave Wilhelm IV, and which was probably destroyed in the Second World War. An inventory of the Kassel observatory drawn up in January 1573 makes it clear that the two works were bound together — they are described as Epitomae Joannis de Regiomonte et Georgii Peurbachii in Almagestum Ptolomaei, una cum Nicolai Copernici Revolutionibus — and since Wilhelm's acquisition of astronomical texts tailed off after his accession in 1567, the balance of probabilities suggests that the Copernicus was a first edition rather a second. See John Leopold , Astronomen, Sterne, Geräte: Landgraf Wilhelm IV. und seine sich selbst bewegenden Globen (Lucerne, 1986), 213–15.

See Lucien Febvre Henri-Jean Martin , The coming of the book, transl. by Gerard D. (London, 1976), 104–8.

Census I.99.

Census I.53.

Joseph Shipman , “Johannes Petreius, Nuremberg publisher of scientific works 1524–1580, with a short-title list of his imprints”, in Lehmann-Haupt H. (ed.), Homage to a bookman: Essays in manuscripts, books and printing written for Hans P. Kraus on his 60th birthday (Berlin, 1967), 147–62, p. 147.

The confusion is hardly surprising, since an early source for the claim that Petreius received his M.A. from Wittenberg exists in the form of Doppelmayr's J. G. Historische Nachricht von den Nürnbergischen Mathematicis und Künstlern (Nuremberg, 1730), 195. But early is not necessarily synonymous with reliable. The claim is repeated by Josef Benzing in his Buchdruckerlexikon es 16. Jahrhunderts (DeutschesSprachgebiet) (Frankfurt am Main, 1952), 131, but in his later Die Buchdrucker des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts im deutschen Sprachgebiet (Wiesbaden, 1963), 334, Basle replaces Wittenberg, and the connection to Adam Petri's printing office is noted. The Neue Deutsche Biographie (Berlin, 1953–), xx, 263, concurs with Benzing's later view.

It is quite plausible that they were, however. The Latinized names could have originated in a common German one, and both Johannes Petreius and Adam Petri were born in Langendorf bei Hammelburg. See Benzing , Die Buchdrucker (ref. 41), 31 and 334.

The fact that more copies of the first edition of Copernicus have been found bound with texts printed by Petri than copies of the second edition supports, I think, rather than detracts from, this argument.

Petri's business dealings frequently took him to Germany; in particular to the fairs at Frankfurt. See Benzing , Die Buchdrucker (ref. 41), 33. This makes his acquisition of some of Petreius's stock much less implausible.

Christopher Hill notes both instances of ownership in his Intellectual origins of the English Revolution revisited (Oxford, 1997), 132 and 241. Smith's ownership is confirmed by the catalogue of his library transcribed in John Strype , The life of the learned Sir Thomas Smith (Oxford, 1820), 274–81, p. 279, and since this catalogue was drawn up on 1 August 1566, his copy was almost certainly a first edition.

A second edition with the mark of an unidentified “Mr Smith” is recorded in the census, however: It is II.321, now in the possession of Texas Tech University, and would need to be eliminated from consideration before it could be stated with a high degree of certainty that Thomas Smith's copy of De revolutionibus is no longer extant. It seems likely however — as recorded in Strype , Thomas Smith (ref. 45), 156, Smith bequeathed his library to Queens' College, Cambridge, but no copy is to be found there now. And since the books still retained by Queens' bear Smith's signature, it is probable that if his copy of De revolutionibus had survived it would have been recognized in the Census. I am indebted to Ian Patterson, Fellow and Librarian of Queens' College, for this information. Whether Ralegh's copy would be likely to be recognized if it still survived I do not know.

To list them briefly for the benefit of those who would like to emulate sixteenth-century practice and correct their copy: (a) on p. XXXI of the Introduction, in ref. 5, the date 143 is printed instead of 1943; (b) the first edition now in the University Library in Giessen is given the census number I.59; it should be I.58; (c) Firminus, the author of Repertorium de mutatione aeris (Paris, 1539), has become Firminius on pp. 120 and 370, although he is correctly named on pp. 250 and 293; (d) on pp. 40, 129, and 279 it is stated that there are eight copies with annotations deriving from Jofrancus Offusius; on pp. 59 and 329, there are nine, a number which agrees with the list on p. XXI of the introduction; (e) within the Census itself, II.256 is listed as bound with Regiomontanus's De triangulis (Nuremberg, 1543); as listed in Appendix IV, this date should be 1533; (f) the classmark of Census I.193, in Cambridge University Library, should be F. 154.b. 1.1, not 1.154.b. 1.1. Errors of this sort are inevitable, and anyone who has studied sixteenth-century texts is likely to take a philosophical view of them. That I have detected so few is a testament both to the superiority of modern publishing techniques and the great care with which the Census has been produced.

Tycho made his remark in a letter to Christoph Rothmann of 20 January 1587; see Dreyer J. L. E. (ed)., Tychonis Brahe Dani Opera omnia (15 vols, Copenhagen, 1913–29), vi, 95.

Online bibliographical databases which provide information about the location of extant copies are already a reality; see, for example, the English Short-Title Catalogue of The Research Libraries Group, Inc.