Essay Review: Planetary Order in the Long Sixteenth Century,the Copernican Question: Prognostication,Skepticism,and Celestial Order

Narratio prima, ed. and transl. into French by Hugonnard-Roche H. Verdet J.-P. Lerner M.-P. Segonds A. (Wrocław, 1982), 49–50: “Quod si talis paulo ante nostram aetatem rerum coelestium doctrina extitisset, nullam Picus in octavo et nono libro occasionem, non solum astrologiam, sed et astronomiam impugnandi habuisset.”

See the letter of G. F. Pico della Mirandola to Benedetto Toriaca (1494) cited by Zambelli P. in “Giovanni Mainardi e la polemica sull'astrologia”, in L'opera e il pensiero di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola nella storia dell'umanesimo, ii, Comunicazioni (Florence, 1965), 205–79, p. 245.

Narratio prima (ref. 1), 43.

Nicolaus Copernicus Gesamtausgabe (Hildesheim, 1974), vi/1, 186–8. This letter, discovered in 1933 in Budapest, was first published by Brachvogel Eugen , “Zur Koppernikusforschung”, Zeitschrift für die Geschichte und Altertumskunde Ermlands , xxv (1935), 237–45. Cf. Swerdlow N. M. Neugebauer O. , Mathematical astronomy in Copernicus's De revolutionibus (New York, 1984), 17–18.

Gesamtausgabe (ref. 4), ii, 4. 28–30: “quod nulla certior ratio motuum machinæ mundi, qui propter nos, ab optimo & regularissimo omnium opifice, conditus esset, philosophis constaret.”

Cf. Green Jonathan , “The first Copernican astrologer: Andreas Aurifaber's Practica for 1541”, Journal for the history of astronomy, xli (2010), 157–65, and Kremer Richard L. , “Calculating with Andreas Aurifaber”, ibid ., 483–502.

Goulding Robert , “Wings (or stairs) to the heavens: The parallactic treatises of John Dee and Thomas Digges”, in Clucas S. (ed.), John Dee: Interdisciplinary studies in English Renaissance thought (Dordrecht, 2006), 41–63; Pumfrey Stephen , “‘Your astronomers and ours differ exceedingly’: The controversy over the ‘new star’ of 1572 in the light of a newly discovered text by Thomas Digges”, The British journal for the history of science , xliv (2010), 29–60.

Previously discovered by Owen Gingerich and Westman in their masterful study, The Wittich Connection: Conflict and priority in sixteenth-century cosmology (Philadelphia, 1988).

Brahe Tycho , Opera omnia, vi, p. 57, lines 38–41.

I thank Lech Szczucki for the information.

Westman R. S. , “Magical reform and astronomical reform: The Yates Thesis reconsidered”, in Westman R. S. McGuire J. E. (eds), Hermeticism and the Scientific Revolution (Los Angeles, 1979), 1–91.