The Moon in the Oxford Tables of 1348

Abstract

Shortly after being recast in Paris in the 1320s, the Alfonsine Tables reached England. There, the otherwise unknown Oxford scholar William Batecombe compiled a set of tables based on them, some of which display a clever and compact presentation. The author composed double argument tables for the five planets and the Moon whose entries depend on two variables. In the case of the planets, the entries are their true longitudes and latitudes, whereas for the Moon the entries are the true elongation of the Moon from the Sun. Thus, the user is able to avoid the long and cumbersome calculations that are required when using tables where the entries in each column depend on a single variable. Batecombe’s tables are extant in many Latin manuscripts, where they are usually called Tabule anglicane, as well as in medieval Hebrew versions. In this paper, we analyze one of these double argument tables not addressed previously, that for the Moon.