Erasmus Reinhold's annotations in the heavily technical section of De revolutionibus, folio 91 verso.
Suddenly, inspiration struck. Perhaps this was a copy from one of those nine readers! But no, that would be an unbelievable coincidence, I told myself. There had to be at least a hundred extant copies (as I naively thought then, badly underestimating the number), and that would make the chance of finding a copy from one of those nine readers about one out of ten, or less. That I had just turned up one of those copies seemed a hypothesis too improbable to entertain for long. But whose copy was it?
I searched in vain for an owner's name. The manuscript inscriptions at the beginning and end provided nary a clue. Then I looked more closely at the heavy pigskin binding. Later I would learn that it was a typical example of a blind-stamped binding—"blind" because the impressed designs had no color or gilding. Around the edges were long patterned strips with biblical figures. Below an empty central panel was the date 1543, and above the panel I noticed the initials ER.
I reacted with a shock. Could the initials stand for Erasmus Reinhold, the leading mathematical astronomer in the generation after Copernicus, and one of the astronomers on our short list of annotators? I seized a pencil and paper to make a rubbing of the dim impression and, to my dismay, found not two, but three, initials: ERS. It seemed my hypothesis had just evaporated.
Back in Cambridge it took a few days to sort out the significance of what I had found. I soon discovered that those three initials, ERS, were exactly what was required for Erasmus Reinholdus Salveldiensis, for in the sixteenth century a man's birthplace—in this case Saalfeld—was a part of his formal designation. Furthermore, the blind-stamps on the binding had been recorded and could be attributed to a Saxon binder, quite possibly working in Wittenberg. I started making inquiries to obtain samples of Reinhold's handwriting, specimens that eventually confirmed my original deduction. And I pondered the implications of the finding. If one book displayed such insights as to how a major professor of astronomy passed over the heliocentric cosmology but accepted the epicyclets, what would more copies reveal?
AND SO MY great Copernicus chase began. At first, I poked around Cambridge, Oxford, and London, all rich repositories of Copernican first editions. Oxford and Cambridge provided a special challenge because there were altogether sixty colleges, each with its own library. Cambridge was easy to search because there existed the published "Adams catalog" of sixteenth-century books in the Cambridge libraries; it took several months, however, to discover that it wasn't complete. Trinity College, Isaac Newton's alma mater and the wealthiest college in Cambridge, actually owned three copies of the first edition, whereas the Adams catalog listed only two. It seemed reasonable to the librarian to declare the third one redundant, so that copy hadn't been listed. Eventually, the fellows at Trinity realized that they faced a dilemma. Clearly they didn't need a third copy of the rare Copernicus first edition, but it was so valuable that if it were auctioned at Sotheby's, there would be a furor in the press to the effect that Trinity College was selling off its patrimony. So the fellows quietly gave up any intention of auctioning it.*
The two first editions Trinity always intended to keep turned out to be the most interesting of the seven copies I found in Cambridge. One, originally owned by a Basel bookseller who had collaborated with the printer of the second edition of De revolutionibus, had already found its way to England by 1570. It was heavily and studiously annotated, probably by the Oxford scholar Edward Hindmarsh, who eventually willed his books to Trinity College, Oxford. How the book got from Oxford to Cambridge is a ruefully poignant story. It was bought in a bookshop in 1794 by one Stephen Street, rector of Trayford in Sussex, who penned the following notice inside the front cover of the book: "This may very probably be a copy of the first edition, if it be, it is worth many Guineas. . . . I hope I shall not be taken for a thief, as I bought this volume of Messrs White's House and have pasted their bill of Parcells into it." However, Street's aging father probably thought he was returning his son's copy to its rightful owner when he gave it to Trinity College, Cambridge, instead of Trinity College, Oxford.
Trinity's second copy of the first edition had been acquired in 1843, on the 300th anniversary of the book's publication, as a gift from Richard Sheepshanks, an English astronomer and fellow of Trinity. The volume was clearly censored, something that puzzled me at the time, and it had some early and seemingly minor notes concentrated in the final part of the book, something that perhaps should have puzzled me at the time but did not.
Finding the books in Oxford was a little harder than in Cambridge because there was no published guide. Very quickly, however, I discovered a private index in the Bodleian Library, which led me to the four first editions scattered throughout the college libraries plus one in the Bodleian itself.
Besides Oxford and Cambridge, the opening rounds of my survey included London, where there is an amazing number of libraries. Who would have guessed that "Dr. Williams's Library," rich in theological volumes, would boast a first-edition Copernicus? How I found out about that one I can no longer remember, nor do I recall who told me about the Polish Institute Library, with its partially annotated but almost hopelessly dilapidated copy. The most memorable experience, however, was not examining the first edition in University College, London, but the path to that library.
In my college philosophy class I had heard about the early-nineteenth-century Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, but I had never expected to meet him. After he died, in 1832, in accordance with his will, his body was dissected in the presence of his friends, and his skeleton was then decked out in his clothes and seated upright in a glass-enclosed case that could be wheeled into the council room so that he could continue to participate in college affairs. The mummified head was replaced with a wax effigy. And there he sat in the front hallway of University College, his glassy eyes staring straight ahead, a half-amused expression on his waxen face. It was a distinctly memorable encounter, perhaps to make up for the library's lightly browned, eminently forgettable, unannotated first-edition De revolutionibus.
In those early weeks of searching for first-edition copies of Copernicus' book, I could scarcely have imagined the ultimate scope of the search. Then I was merely checking the copies to see how many contained evidence of serious readership, aiming to make a fairly simple list of locations together with brief information concerning the extent of annotations, if any. Of the dozen and a half copies I managed to locate in Cambridge, Oxford, and London, only one was thoroughly annotated, and two others had some marginalia of note. It was already apparent that Reinhold's copy in Edinburgh had been an incredibly lucky starting point, and it seemed that the yield of richly marked up copies would not be high. Perhaps it was true that the book had not many, indeed, hardly any, readers.
* Schoner published an equatorium, a book with movable disks that could be set to determine the positions of planets. Such disks are called volvelles, and these paper instruments were sometimes used as actual calculating devices and sometimes just for pedagogy. For example, beginning in 1538 the introductory astronomy textbook used at Wittenberg, Sacrobosco's Sphere, always included three or four teaching volvelles, and immediately they were copied in the editions published in Venice, Paris, and Antwerp.
† Because Rheticus later dedicated to Schoner his "first account" of the heliocentric system written while visiting the Polish astronomer, we can suppose he learned about Copernicus during his visit to Schoner in Nuremberg.
‡ Now Frombork in northern Poland; I will use the Polish name when referring to modern geography.
* The same is true for Copernicus himself. When he was Rheticus' age, in 1498, he journeyed from Poland to Italy for his graduate studies. We have no record of precisely when he left or arrived on his 900-mile journey to Bologna, or how he traveled.
* The three bound volumes, shown in plate 4, contained five titles. Ptolemy's Greek Almagest (Basel, 1538) was bound alone. Witelo's Greek Optika (Petr
eius, 1535) was bound with Apianus's lnstrumen-tumprimi mobilis (Petreius, 1534). The Greek edition of Euclid's geometry (Basel, 1533) was bound with Regiomontanus's De triangulis (Petreius, 1533).
† Since Copernicus's original manuscript survives, which is most unusual for a book printed in the Renaissance, it is possible to see that this is the case.
‡ In the preface to his book, Copernicus expressed his reluctance to publish, saying he feared he would be "hissed off the stage" and: "The scorn that I had to fear on account of the newness and absurdity of my opinion almost drove me to abandon a work already undertaken."
* There is recently discovered evidence that Rheticus actually returned briefly to Wittenberg in December 1540 and delivered a short course on Sacrobosco's Sphere. He must have informed Reinhold, Melanchthon, Schoner, and others about Copernicus' book.
† This division of the mathematical arts goes back to Pythagoras in Greek antiquity; in the fourth century A.D. the Roman encyclopedist Martianus Capella laid the foundations for the medieval curriculum based on the seven liberal arts: the introductory tririum (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the more advanced quadrivium.
* Although entitled Commentary on the Sphere of Sacrobosco, Clavius' book went so far beyond the small traditional text written in Paris by Sacrobosco around 1215 that it is considered an independent work. Until Clavius' huge expansion, in one edition or another Sacrobosco's Sphere had been the standard introductory astronomy text for more than three centuries.
* Ptolemy's astronomical handbook, or Almagest, is the classical formulation of geocentric astronomy. It is an epoch-making volume because it showed for the first time that the complex appearances of planetary motion could be accounted for by a group of relatively simple mathematical devices. But one of them, the so-called equant, was heavily criticized in the Middle Ages because it appeared to violate the celestial principle of uniform circular motion. More details, including an example of an epicyclet, are found in appendix 1 of this volume.
* Perhaps that was just as well, because there are always unexpected dangers in deaccessioning. An extra copy of Descartes' Geometry, which Trinity had set aside for sale, turned out to have Isaac Newton's critical remarks scattered throughout the margins. The most spectacular example involved not Cambridge, however, but Gottingen University in Germany. The university library had once owned two copies of Newton's Principia, so they decided to sell the dirty one, all marked up by some previous owner. Only after the duplicate was released did someone discover that the critic who messed up the pages was none other than Newton's rival, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. That copy of the Principia is now one of the great treasures of the Bodmeriana Collection in the outskirts of Geneva.
Chapter 3 †
IN THE STEPS OF COPERNICUS
WHAT SORT OF person was Copernicus? Did he like puns? Did he ever play jokes on his classmates or his fellow canons? Did he enjoy music? He probably never tasted a potato, or chocolate, or drank a cup of coffee, food that had scarcely whetted European palates in his time, but was he keen on beer, or had he developed a taste for wine in his Italian sojourn during his graduate school days?
Was he tall, dark, and handsome? Did he ever have a girlfriend? Did he like children? Alas, these are unanswerable questions. No personal memoirs exist. Of his seventeen surviving letters, fifteen deal essentially with cathedral matters, the sixteenth concerns currency reform, and the seventeenth is a long technical astronomical account, but unfortunately not dealing with his cosmology. Half a century after Copernicus' death, a professor at Cracow began assembling materials for a biography, but that story was never written and the data have been lost.
As I began my quest for copies of his book, Copernicus himself was a shadowy personality for me. His piercing eyes look out from the portrait preserved in the town hall in Toruh, his birthplace, his pupils reflecting the Gothic windows of his homeland, and his red jerkin more engaging than the drab habit of a friar. Yet he was hardly more than a cardboard figure propped up in a shop window. Among many things, during the course of my investigations these initial impressions gradually transformed into an understanding of the man and his impact.
A few weeks after my fateful trip to Edinburgh in 1970, my travels took me to Uppsala, seat of the most distinguished university in Sweden, and there the transformation began, when I first laid eyes on Copernicus' working library, the actual volumes that he had used and annotated.
The Uppsala astronomers had invited me to give several technical lectures on my own astrophysical researches. From a previous visit I knew the observatory had a magnificent library, so I made sure that my schedule included plenty of time to work my way through the shelves, book by book, handling not only great landmark volumes, such as first editions of Isaac Newton's Principia and John Napier's Logarithmia, but the many minor and often rarer works that make up the fabric of normal science. The observatory library had an outstanding showing of Kepler's titles, and, remarkably, there was even a marvelous volume that contained notes in Copernicus' own hand. On the illustrated pages of eclipse predictions in Johann Stoeffler's Calendarium Romanum magnam, Copernicus had recorded his observations made in the 1530s and early 1540s (plate lb).
That volume in the observatory library was just the tip of the iceberg as far as the Uppsala University Copernicana were concerned. A century after Copernicus' death, the library of the cathedral where Copernicus had written the principal parts of his De revolutionibus had been captured by the Swedes during the Thirty Years' War and shipped off to Scandinavia. The great majority of these books had ended up in the University Library in Uppsala, where they had been systematically ferreted out by several generations of visiting scholars from Poland. At that moment the librarian from Copernicus' hometown, Toruh, was working in the main library, and on his desk I caught my first glimpse of the Frauenburg hoard. From him I obtained a list of books that Copernicus used, which I added to my own voluminous notes on the observatory's collection.* But I did not then have the time to inspect the Copernican books.
I would twice return to Sweden in my search for Copernicus, but then I needed to head south to Copernicus' Polish homeland, to join the international committee as it finalized the plans for the forthcoming Quinquecentennial in 1973. As secretary, Jerry Ravetz guided the proceedings, reviewing the progress on a volume of studies on the reception of Copernican astronomy, and the plans for an excursion called "In the Footsteps of Copernicus."
One of three sixteenth-century copies of Copernicus' Commentariolus, preserved in a printed copy of Derevolutionibus at the Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
"Some of the most important things at conferences happen on the excursion buses," my friend and fellow astronomer Jerzy Dobrzycki remarked during a break in our sessions. "If it hadn't been for a conversation in a bus at the international congress here in 1965, we might never have discovered the third manuscript of Copernicus' Commentariolus."
The Commentariolus, or "Little Commentary," documented an early stage of Copernicus' work. Never printed during his lifetime, it was apparently distributed by manuscript to a few of his confidants. For a long time this document remained out of sight to Copernican scholars, and then around 1880 a Swedish scholar discovered a manuscript copy at the Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. A few years later a second manuscript turned up in the National Library in Vienna. At first it was dated to the 1530s, the decade before the publication oi De revolutionibus in 1543. Then, however, researchers found an inventory of the library of a sixteenth-century Cracow professor, one Matthew of Miechow, with an entry, "A manuscript of six leaves in which the author asserts that the Earth moves while the Sun stands still." When scholars noticed that it described the document found in Stockholm and Vienna, they realized that the Commentariolus itself had to antedate May 1514, the date of Matthew's inventory. In other words, the "Little Commentary" showed a preliminary form of Copernicus' approach to the heliocentric arrangement, dating at least thirty years before De revolutionibus was p
ublished, and it offered a different arrangement of the small secondary circles than he finally adopted in his magnum opus.
Neither the Stockholm nor the Vienna manuscript was in Copernicus' hand. They were secondary copies, and they had certain discordances, not to mention that the one in Vienna lacked several leaves. Thus, finding another early copy was a discovery of some importance, and a bus ride had provided the catalyst. During a conference excursion from Warsaw to Cracow in 1965, Dobrzycki had had a chance conversation with the Scottish scholar W. P. D. Wightman. Wightman had described some curious annotations on interleaved pages of a copy of De revolutionibus found at his home university in Aberdeen. The annotations had been made by Duncan Liddel, a sixteenth-century Scot who had taught at Rostock in northern Europe before returning to Aberdeen with a rich collection of continental books. From Wightman's partial description of the notes, Dobrzycki guessed that they might comprise another copy of the Commentariolus, a hunch that turned out to be correct. It stands as the single most significant piece of Copernican research in the 1960s.
The opportunity to discuss with Dobrzycki my own recent findings in Scotland made attendance at that 1970 committee meeting particularly memorable. He was by then rapidly becoming a key authority on Copernicus, and he listened attentively to the news about Reinhold's well-annotated copy.
The Book Nobody Read Page 4