Scepticism and French Interest in Copernicanism to 1630

Westman Robert , “The astronomer's role in the sixteenth century: A preliminary study”, History of science, xviii (1980), 105–47, p. 136n. His list of confirmed Copernicans includes two Englishmen, two Italians, one Lowlander, one Spaniard, and four Germans. Copernicus, of course, was a Pole. Ismaël Boulliau seems to have been the first committed French Copernican. He wrote in 1633 that he had been a Copernican for ten years.

Plattard Jean , “Le système de Copernic dans la littérature fran&çaise à XVIe siècle”, Revue du seizième siècle, xvi (1913), 220–37. Plattard found only eight French authors who mentioned Copernicus in the course of the sixteenth century. As shall be seen, there were a good many more than that as well as several foreigners who lived in France for a time or published works there.

Popkin Richard , The history of scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Los Angeles, 1979).

Schmitt Charles , Cicero scepticus (The Hague, 1972). Schmitt is less convinced of the distinction in the sixteenth century between Academic and Pyrrhonic scepticism than is Popkin (p. 8).

Jardine N. , “The forging of modern realism: Clavius and Kepler against the sceptics”, Studies in history and philosophy of science, x (1979), 141–71; and The birth of history and philosophy of science (Cambridge, 1984). See Duhem Pierre , To save the phenomena (Chicago, 1969), for a more sympathetic account of these sceptics or instrumentalists, as Duhem refers to them.

Taton René , “Contribution à l'étude de la diffusion du De revolutionibus de Copernic”, Revue d'histoire des sciences, xxvii (1974), 307–27. I owe special thanks to Owen Gingerich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who kindly shared with me the fruits of his research on the location of extant copies of the first and second editions of De revolutionibus. For a description of that research, see Broad W. J. , “A bibliophile's quest for Copernicus”, Science, ccxix (1982), 661–4. Gingerich intends soon to publish a monograph study of the extant copies.

See Plattard , “Système de Copernic”; and Busson Henri , Le rationalisme dans la littérature fran&çaise de la Renaissance (Paris, 1957), 256–7.

Quoted by Rosen Edward , “Maurolico's attitude toward Copernicus”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, c (1957), 177–94, p. 182, n.29.

Pena's introduction to the Optics of Euclid in French translation is in Albert de Rochas, La Science des philosophes et l'art des thaumaturges dans l'Antiquité (Paris, 1912), 223–4. Pena's life and cosmology has been studied by Barker Peter : “Jean Pena (1528–58) and Stoic physics in the sixteenth century”, presented at the 1984 Spindel Philosophy Conference.

On Talon as a sceptic, see Schmitt , Cicero scepticus, 81–90; and Popkin , History of scepticism, 28–30. See also Allen D. C. , Doubt's boundless sea: Scepticism and faith in the Renaissance (Baltimore, 1964), 77.

Talon Omar , Academicae questiones (Paris, 1550), lib. XLIV, p. 104. See Talon's biography in Nouvelle biographie générale, xliv, 850. The commonplace that Rabelais mentioned Copernicus as early as 1546 fails to take into account the fact that while his statement about a moving boat in water may possibly have come from Copernicus, he made no direct reference to the Polish astronomer.

See especially Schmitt , Cicero scepticus, 78–81.

Quoted by Jardine , The birth of history and philosophy of science, 268. See pp. 234–6, 266–9, for Jardine on Ramus's “astronomy without hypotheses”.

Rosen Edward , “The Ramus-Rheticus correspondence”, The journal of the history of ideas, i (1940), 363–8.

Morphos Paul Panos (ed.), The dialogues of Guy de Brués (Baltimore, 1953). On Brués see also Schmitt , Cicero scepticus , 102–4; and Boase Alan , The fortunes of Montaigne (New York, 1970), p. xviii.

Morphos , Dialogues , 102–3, 149. According to the Gingerich census, Ronsard owned a copy of De revolutionibus.

Yates Frances , French academies of the sixteenth century (London, 1947), esp. p. 77. For a full biography of Tyard, see Baridon S. F. , Pontus de Tyard(1521–1605)(Milan, 1953). Also Kushner Eva , “Pontus de Tyard devant le pouvoir royal”, in Culture et pouvoir au temps de l'humanisme de la Renaissance (Paris, 1978), 340–61.

Municipale Bibliothèque Vienne , Cote B 898. Tyard's name is written on the title page in what appears to be the same hand as the notes. Vienne is about 130km south of Mâcon, and its library was created by the confiscation of several ecclesiastical libraries in 1793.

De revolutionibus, fol. 46v. Prof. Gingerich has worked out the calculations for precession and trepidation for Tyard's note and has concluded that it was for 1557 (private research notes). Tyard was a good enough astronomer to produce a massive star table, Ephemerides octavae sphaerae (Lyon, 1562).

de Tyard Pontus , L'Univers ou discours des parties et de la nature du monde (Lyon, 1557), 99. Lapp J. C. , “Pontus de Tyard and science”, The Romantic review, xxxviii (1947), 16–23, points out that the references to Copernicus were left unchanged over the three editions of this dialogue.

Tyard , L'Univers, 100.

On the Mantice, see Yates , French academies, 93–98; Thorndike Lynn , A history of magic and experimental science, vi (New York, 1941), 106–8.

Tyard's works were published under the collective title of Discours philosophiques (Paris, 1587), which is the edition I used for the Deux discours, 268v.

Lapp J. C. , The universe of Pontus de Tyard (Ithaca, N.Y., 1950), p. xlv, citing Tyard , Discours sur temps. Other authors such as Kathleen Hall, Pontus de Tyard and his Discours philosophiques (London, 1963), 136–43, have seen Tyard as a more convinced sceptic, but his works seem to support Lapp's sense of moderate scepticism.

Montaigne , In defense of Raymond Sebond, translated by Beattie A. H. (New York, 1959), 86–87. See Lapp , The universe, pp. xliv–xlv, for a number of close comparisons of the two men's thought.

See Popkin Richard , “Skepticism and the Counter-Reformation in France”, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, li (1960), 58–87.

Hellman Doris , The comet of 1577 (New York, 1944).

Popkin , History of scepticism, 56–63.

Charron Pierre , La Sagesse (Paris, 1604), Book I, chap. XLI. Boase , Fortunes of Montaigne, 92–94; Allen , Doubt's boundless sea, 88–99.

On Du Perron, see Yates , French academies, 88–100; Popkin , History of scepticism, 68–70.

Belot Jean , Les Fleurs de la philosophie chrestienne et morale (Paris, 1603).

Camus Pierre Camus Pierre , Les Diversitez (Paris, 1610), iv, 189r, 368r. Boase , Fortunes of Montaigne , 114–29; Popkin , History of scepticism, 62–64, 80. Joseph Scaliger, the son of the afore-mentioned Julius-Ceasar and active in this era, was sympathetic to both Copernicanism and scepticism, but apparently he did not use the theory to provide support for the philosophy. See Costabel Pierre , “État actuel des recherches sur la réception de l'héliocentrisme”, Studia Copernicana, xiv (1975), 17–26; Boase , Fortunes of Montaigne, p. xix.

Boucher Jean , Apologie pour Jehan Chastel (n.p., 1595), 262–3. He repeated his denunciation in Defense de M. Jean Boucher… (Tournai, 1626), 15–16; Porthaise Jean , Cinq sermons… en icelle esquels est traicté tant de la simulée conversion du Roy de Navarre (Paris, 1594), 96; anon., De justa reipub. Christianae in rrges [sic] impios et haereticos authoritate (Paris, 1590), 348v.

Yates , French academies, 80–105.

Bodin Jean , Naturae theatrum (Paris, 1596); cited by Stimson Dorothy , The gradual acceptance of the Copernican theory (New York, 1917), 45–57; Chauvet wrote a “De la sphere du monde” (Bibliothèque Nationale, Fonds Fran&çais 12268), which opposed the theory of a mobile Earth. It contains the date of 10 March 1580. The best discussion of Foix de Candale is Harrie J. E. , “Fran&çois Foix de Candale and the hermetic tradition in sixteenth-century France” (unpublished dissertation, University of California-Riverside, 1975). See also Westman Robert S. , “Magical reform and astronomical reform: The Yates thesis reconsidered”, in Westman R. S. and McGuire J. E. , Hermeticism and the Scientific Revolution (Los Angeles, 1977), 3–91, pp. 42–45. On Viète, see Swerdlow Noel , “The planetary theory of Fran&çois Viète”, Journal for the history of astronomy, vi (1975), 185–208.

de Bérulle Pierre , Grandeurs de Jesus (Paris, 1619), 16li. See the discussion on Bérulle by Otto von Simson in Gingerich Owen (ed.), The nature of scientific discovery (Washington, 1975), 487–8. See Popkin , History of scepticism , 80, on Bérulle's scepticism, and Boase , Fortunes of Montaigne, pp. xix–xxi, on his Platonism.

Marandé Léonard , Le Jugemen des actions humains (Paris, 1624), 75.

On Gassendi, see Bloch O. R. , La philosophie de Gassendi (La Haye, 1971). For Mersenne, see Lenoble Robert , Mersenne ou La Naissance du mécanisme, and Hine William , “Mersenne and Copernicanism”, Isis, lxxiv (1973), 16–32. On both as sceptics, see Popkin , History of scepticism, 129–50.

Tarde Jean , Les astres de Borbon et Apologie pour le Soleil… (Paris, 1622), 24, 60–64. The book had originally been published in Latin in 1620. See also Favaro Antonio , “Di Giovanni Tarde e di una sua Visita a Galileo”, Bulletino di bibliografia e di storia delle scienze matematiche, xx (1887), 345–71; Rosen Edward , “Jean Tarde”, Dictionary of scientific biography, xii, 256–7. Tarde is better known for his maps of several dioceses of Gascony.

le Vayer La Mothe , Cinq Dialogues faits à l'imitation des anciens, 74, cited by Boase , Fortunes of Montaigne, 207. See also Popkin , History of scepticism, 90–97.

de Rochemonteix Camille , Un collège de Jesuites aux X VIIe et XVIIe siècles: Le Collège Henri IV de La Flèche (Le Mans, 1889), i, 238.

For a more extensive but by no means complete discussion of Copernicanism in France between 1630 and 1650, see Ridely B. S. , “Dalibray, Le Pailleur, and the ‘new astronomy’ in French seventeenth-century poetry”, Journal of the history of ideas, xvii (1956), 3–27.

Gingerich Owen , “The censorship of Copernicus' De Revolutionibus”, Annali dell'Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze, vi, Pt 2 (1981), 45–61. According to Gingerich, only four copies outside of Italy were corrected. None of the six copies that I have seen, including four from clerical libraries, had the condemned sections censured.

See especially Stimson, The gradual acceptance of the Copernican theory, passim.

Similar studies for other nations do not exist, but some comparison can be made by consulting the articles in Dobrzycki J. (ed.), The reception of Copernicus' heliocentric theory (Boston, [1972]).

Owen Gingerich, private research notes.