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Dinesh club

Posted: 06 Apr 2022

Taken: 06 Apr 2022

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THE BOOK IN THE RENAISSANCE •
Andrew Pettergree •
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Copernicus •

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The book nobody read

The book nobody read
Fig, 56 Copernicus, ‘De Revolutionibus’. On the title-page the owner, Willebrord Snell, affirms his support for Copernicus’s views and has disapproved of the cautious preface inserted by Andreas Oslander (without the author’s knowledge0, to the extent that Copernicus’s radical hypotheses ‘need not be true not even probable.’

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Copernicus’s discovery did not win wide acceptance straight away. Even those who assisted in its publication were careful to distance themselves from its most daring, and potentially heretical, propositions. Only two generations later, with the more sustained published programme of Kepler, would the heliocentric hypothesis begin to dominate cosmographical science, leading to the notable denouement of the trial of Galileo. What does this tell us? Was Copernicus’s text, as the author Arthur Koestler famously declared, ‘the book nobody read?

If Copernicus did not immediately radicalise cosmography, he was certainly not ignored. Forty years ago, the American astronomer Owen Gingerich, goaded by Koestler’s caustic aphorism, determined to examine the contemporary influence of Copernicus’s book by compiling an exhaustive bibliography of surviving copies of the two sixteenth-century editions. Spurred by his discovery (in the Royal observatory in Edinburgh) of the copy of the first edition annotated by Erasmus Reinhold, Professor of Astrology at Witterberg, Gingerich embarked on a remarkable odyssey, tracking down a total of some 600 copies about half the estimated original print run of 500 copies in each edition. Many were richly annotated, suggesting a close engagement with the text, even by owners who were careful to signal their disagreement with the central heretical thesis of a rotating earth.

The spread of contemporary notes of ownership, in Germany, England and France, makes to own. The number of copies that are relatively pristine condition suggests that some owners did not study the text very intensively: for them it was a prestige purchase rather than a text with which they engaged. But the scientists who owned this work did read it very carefully, and often filled the margins with detailed notes. When a distinguished scientific author died other colleagues were very keen to buy his books, largely to have access to these manuscript notes. Such annotations were even sometimes transcribed from vopy to copy: they became, in this sense, an important part of the research resource. This was a small intimate world where manuscript and print converged and sometimes merged. ` Page 280/281
2 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.

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