The Book Nobody Read

by Owen Gingerich

  The Inquisition's censorship of De revolutionibus, in Galileo's hand in his personal copy.

  Copernicus' De revolutionibus, and two later additions, Kepler's Epitome of Copernican Astronomy and Galileo's Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, remained on the Index until this became something of a scandal. Not until 1835 did a copy of the Roman Index appear without these titles.*

  FOR TWO YEARS during the 1980s I hosted a student from mainland China at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Shida Weng was a victim of China's cultural revolution, consigned to the backwaters when he might profitably have been in graduate school, but he had spent the time teaching himself English. In 1982 the Chinese government sent him to Cambridge to study the history of astronomy. During his stay I took Shida as my guest to the History of Science Society meeting in Norwalk, the one where Bob Westman and I presented our results on Wittich's annotated copies of Copernicus' book. En route I asked Shida what had been his most surprising impression of the United States. He replied that in America we have so many choices, what to wear, what to eat, what to read—a perceptive analysis, I thought. I told him that I hoped to visit his country someday.

  1a. The "Eames machine" in the IBM Copernican exhibit demonstrated the equivalence between the Ptolemaic epicyclic model (left) and the Copernican orbits for Mars—the rods remained parallel as the circles rotated in each system.

  1b. Copernicus' eclipse annotations in his copy of johann Stoeffler's Calendarium Romanum magnum.

  2. Tobias Stimmer's portrait of Copernicus, part of the decoration of the great astronomical clock in the Strasbourg Cathedral.

  3. Nicolaus Copernicus, Torun town hall, presumably based on the self-portrait mentioned by Stimmer (see facing page).

  4a. The three volumes given to Copernicus, with Rheticus'presentation inscription.

  4b. Erasmus Reinhold's summary on the title page of his richly annotated De revolutionibus.

  5a. The Copernican Library preserved at Vppsala University. Copernicus' copy of the Regiomontanus Epitome of the Almagest has not been located, and another copy (foreground) was substitued for the picture.

  5b. Charles Eames photographing the Copernican books in the Vppsala University Library.

  6. Peter Apian s Astronomicum Caesareum with Tycho Brahe's presentation inscription to Paul Wittich.

  7a. Copernicus'brief observational notes in the so-called "Vppsala notebook "

  74. Thomas Digges's signed endorsement of Copernicus: "The common opinion errs."

  7c. Herwart yon Hohenburg's colorful annotations in his De revolutionibus.

  7d. Rheticus'' dedication inscription to the Varmian canon George Donner.

  7e. Wilhelm Schickard y s artistic talents are evident in his marginal drawing of a triquetrum, one of the few instruments mentioned by Copernicus.

  7f. Michael Maestlin's note identifying Andreas Osiander as the anonymous author of the Ad lectorem on the back of the title page of Copernicus' book

  8a. Owen Gingerich with Shida Weng and Peishan Li examining the second and third editions of De revolutionibus and Kepler's Rudolphine Tables in the rare book room of the National Library of China, Beijing, 1985.

  8b. Owen Gingerich examining the most important first edition of De revolutionibus in the Western Hemisphere, in Yale University's Beinecke Library. His own copy of the second edition lies just beyond the first.

  Our opportunity came in the fall of 1985. Miriam and I decided to begin an Asian tour in China, and Shida provided a timely invitation. Besides the mandatory visit to the Great Wall and a trip to see Xi'an's astonishing terra-cotta army, I had two specific goals: I wanted to see the Pascal calculating machine sent to Beijing possibly by Louis XIV, and I hoped to inspect the two copies of De revolutionibus brought to China by Jesuit missionaries in 1618.

  For centuries astronomers were the major consumers of numbers. In 1623-24 Kepler's friend Wilhelm Schickard (whose well-annotated De revolutionibus is today in the Basel University Library—see plate 7e) designed a calculating machine to assist in Kepler's continuing numerical problems, but unfortunately it was destroyed in a fire before it could be tested in real calculations. The oldest surviving mechanical calculating machine, from 1644, was made by the French mathematician Blaise Pascal, not for astronomers but to assist his father with financial calculations at the customs office, and a few original examples survive.* In the seventeenth century wealthy Europeans coveted the silks and porcelain that came only from China, but the Chinese were not interested in very much of what Europeans had to offer. One exception was fancy clocks, and another was automata, such as mechanical dolls that danced to the tunes of mechanical music boxes.

  The Pascal calculating machine was a novelty of precisely the sort to intrigue the Chinese court, and in researching the history of automatic calculating devices for a Charles Eames exhibition, I had learned that there were two Pascal machines in the Royal Palace in the Forbidden City in Beijing. But even when Miriam and I arrived in Beijing, Shida Weng was not at all certain that we would be given permission to see the Pascal machines, which were in a restricted section of the Royal Palace. Then, as mysteriously as many things in China, the permission was granted. We were taken into rooms not ordinarily open to visitors, and there the devices were gently lifted out of their packing boxes. One proved to be the genuine French import. The other, we were surprised to discover, was an almost exact Chinese copy. Later, when I reported our experience to Joseph Needham, the eminent English student of Chinese science and civilization, he allowed that we were probably the only westerners to have examined these machines in the past half century.

  The two copies of De revolutionibus arrived in China about thirty years earlier than the Pascal calculator. Shida Weng himself had never before gained permission to examine these books, and seeing them was only slightly less of a cliff-hanger than viewing the Pascal machines. We were taken to the National Library, which must have been a very suitable and handsome structure when it was built in 1931, but was in 1985 (like many libraries around the world) awaiting more commodious quarters.* The rooms were filled with readers save for the one reserved for the works of Marx and Lenin, which was as quiet as an undiscovered tomb. The rare book room was chilly and singularly austere, but three volumes I had specifically requested were on reserve for us: a second edition of De revolutionibus and also a third edition from 1617, both of which were brought by Jesuit missionaries in 1618; and a copy of Kepler's Rudolphine Tables, which obviously came somewhat later since it wasn't published until 1627 (plate 8a). The Jesuit library was not nationalized until after the Chinese revolution of 1949. In this action the Chinese were singularly backward, since most of the Jesuit libraries in Europe had been nationalized a century and a half earlier.

  The two editions of De revolutionibus had traveled to China at an especially interesting time, because the Vatican decree prohibiting Copernicus' book "until corrected" had appeared in 1616, but the corrections were not issued until 1620, by which time the two Jesuits who had brought the books had already made their way to Beijing. The 1566 edition, brought by Giacomo Rao, included Rheticus' Narratio prima, which had been reprinted as an appendix; Rao crossed off Rheticus' name on the title page because as a Lutheran Rheticus was considered a "first-class" author, meaning that all of his works were banned, but the Narratio prima was not excised (as sometimes happened). However, the Lutheran names at the beginning of the appendix were struck out. Otherwise the book was uncensored and unannotated.

  The draconian censorship of the entirety of Book I, chapter 8, the only known copy in which the more severe form of the Vatican's excisions was performed. Biblioteca Statale, Cremona.

  The third edition, brought to China by Nicholas Trigault, S.J., was treated slightly differently. Chapter 8, on the refutation of the ancient arguments against the mobility of the Earth, was marked in Latin, "This chapter is not to be read." This must have been a shrewd guess, probably on Trigault's part, because among the remarks contained in the
1620 decree was the statement that chapter 8 could be excised in its entirety. The decree went on to say, however, that because students might wish to see how the arguments of the book were developed, it would be satisfactory simply to reword two of the passages in the chapter. Presumably, this instruction never caught up with Trigault. Among the nearly six hundred copies examined in my survey, only one suffered the more draconian treatment: The second edition in Cremona has the central leaf of chapter 8 sliced out, but the beginning and ending of the chapter were printed with uncensored material on the other side, so sheets of paper were pasted over this prohibited part. I'm not sure who would have been put off by the warning in Trigault's third edition, but it does offer a fascinating window on the mindset of the Vatican workers in the early seventeenth century.

  * Copernicus used the word explodendum, which means "being hissed or clapped off the stage." The Oxford English Dictionary confirms that this is also the original but now obsolete meaning of the English word explode, which did not pick up the modern definition of "to blow up with a loud noise" until around 1700. Shakespeare never used the word despite its theatrical connotation, but his contemporary Kepler did, undoubtedly in an echo of Copernicus' usage, when in the introduction to his Astronomia nova he wrote (in Latin), "First, Ptolemy is certainly hissed off the stage." Kepler may have been sensi-rized to the word by Galileo, who used it in his first letter to Kepler, in 1597.

  * "Thou hast fixed the Earth immovable and firm, thy throne firm from of old; for all eternity thou art God."

  † There the matter stood for a decade. Then, in 1971, a French scholar noticed that in a sermon on I Corinthians 10 and 11, Calvin denounced those "who will say that the Sun does not move and that it is the Earth that shifts and turns." Calvin neither mentioned Copernicus by name, nor did he invoke any Scripture against heliocentrism itself. In fact, it has been cogently argued that Calvin was alluding to a quotation in Cicero brought on by a debate with one of his understudies who had fallen out of his good favor. So the jury is still out on Calvin's opinion, if any, on Copernicus and his book.

  * One copy is in the British Library, and the other is in the library in Greifswald, Germany.

  * Despite the makeshift arrangement, the photograph was good enough to appeaf in the appropriate Complete Works volume of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

  † Such indifference was characteristic of the period: Kepler sometimes spelled his name Keppler.

  ‡ The Michelin Guide characterized Ariosto's Orlando Furioso as the Renaissance equivalent of Gone with the Wind.

  * Incidentally, Andrew Dickson White, though an unreliable guide to the religious reception of Copernicus' book, did own a first edition of De revolutionibus, now pteserved in the library of Cornell University. A previous owner had been the English antiquary John Aubrey (1626-97), and since the book had spent the critical years in England, it was not censored.

  * SeveraI examples are found in the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers in Paris, another in the historical museum in Clermont-Ferrand (Pascal's hometown), one in the State Mathematical-Physical Salon in Dresden, and one in the IBM Collection in New York.

  * A new building was opened in October 1987; it is now the largest single library building in the world.

  Chapter 10

  THE HUB OF THE UNIVERSE

  THE PICTURESQUE Swiss town of Schaffhausen, still retaining its medieval center, sits in a leaf-shaped salient largely surrounded by Germany. In fact, this geographic oddity itself completely envelops several pockets of German territory, as I had learned in trying to take shortcuts in the vicinity. I had purchased an export car at the VW factory in Wolfsburg, but my tax-free status in Germany had expired, so unintentionally crossing into Germany was a considerable nuisance. But being in a salient north of the Rhine was more than a nuisance for the citizens of Schaffhausen in World War II. It was a disaster. On 1 April, 1944, a thousand Allied bombs mistakenly rained down on the precariously situated town.

  On that spring evening a score of B24 bombers had headed toward the German chemical works in Ludwigshafen, twenty miles farther east at the tip of Lake Constance, but clouds and winds over France confused the formation, which lost its way. When the lights of a town appeared through a clearing in the clouds, crews of thirteen of the planes assumed they were over Germany and mistakenly dropped their deadly loads onto Schaffhausen. The damage and civilian casualties in neutral Switzerland prompted a diplomatic crisis for the United States. An apology and a million dollars in reparations were immediately forthcoming, supplemented by three million more in October.

  Among the losses were nine paintings by the sixteenth-century Swiss artist Tobias Stimmer. When Stimmer decorated the famous astronomical clock in the Strasbourg cathedral, he included a portrait of Copernicus (plate 2). As part of the painting he conspicuously inscribed the words vera efigies ex ipsius autographo depicta—"a true likeness from his own self-portrait." Stimmer's caption has led scholars to conjecture that the lovely and similar portrait of Copernicus now hanging in the city hall in Torun (his Polish birthplace) is, if not the actual self-portrait painted by Copernicus himself, at least a copy of a sketch made by the multitalented astronomer. There is as well a handsome woodcut by Stimmer, which, like the Strasbourg image, shows Copernicus holding a lily of the valley, a Renaissance symbol for a medical doctor.

  Wood-block portrait of Copernicus attributed to Tobias Stimmer. The lily of the valley is the standard early Renaissance icon for a medical doctor.

  Part of the American reparations went to establish the Tobias Stim­mer Foundation, to help the museum in Schaffhausen acquire substitutes for their irreplaceable treasures. Among the pieces that survived the bombing is a curious sixteenth-century wooden instrument with a movable dial that can be used to calculate lunar phases. Some years ago the museum was able to purchase with the Stimmer Foundation funds the unique copy of the explanatory booklet that belongs with the instrument, and subsequently the foundation asked if I could provide a commentary to the book and instrument. I swiftly agreed, for there was a second reason I wished to visit Schaffhausen: The library next door to the museum (apparently undamaged in the raid) holds one of the most important copies of Copernicus' De revolutionibus. Thus, in a roundabout way, the American bombing of Schaffhausen in 1944 paid for my visit there in 1987.

  The City Library sits in the charming medieval centrum of Schaff­hausen. It is not large enough to support a rare book librarian. To see the Copernicus, I had to ask in the children's department, but I was allowed to take the book into the main reading room. There I opened it with some reverence. As an annotated copy, it is second only to the Reinhold volume that had precipitated the entire Copernicus chase, for it was thoroughly annotated by Michael Maestlin, a leading astronomer of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and Johannes Kepler's teacher. It was not the first time I had seen the book. I had examined and photographed it in 1972, and the library had provided a microfilm. The annotations were as fascinating as they were frustrating to read. The ink had partly faded, and still more troublesome, Maestlin wrote with an incredibly minuscule hand, so in many places, even using the microfilm, I could scarcely read what he had written. It required a firsthand examination to decipher some of the key marginalia.

  Maestlin had been born in 1550, seven years after the publication of De revolutionibus, in Goppingen, a village about thirty miles east of Tubingen where he spent most of his professional career. As was the case with many young scholars including Kepler, his most famous student, he did his undergraduate studies at a preparatory school and came to the university to take his final exams and pick up his baccalaureate degree. Then he enrolled for the master's degree followed by the theological program, because Tubingen University's primary mission was to prepare young men for the Lutheran ministry. Thus educated, he was sent off in 1576 as an assistant pastor to Backnang, a post about twenty miles northwest of Goppingen. His time there was rather like that of young people today who serve in the Peace Corps
before taking up their intended careers.

  Michael Maestlin at age twenty-eight, from his Ephemerides novae (Tubingen, 1580), author's collection.

  Maestlin's real talent lay in astronomy, and while a master's student he had invested in his copy of De revolutionibus. At age twenty-one, he had edited a new edition of Reinhold's Prutenic Tables, that set of numbers based on Copernicus to be used for computing planetary positions. While pastoring at Backnang, he published his observations of the Great Comet of 1577; like Tycho Brahe, he showed that the comet lay beyond the Moon, contrary to the accepted teachings of Aristotle. So it was only a matter of fulfilling his service appointment before he could move on, finally, at the age of thirty, to a mathematics professorship at Heidelberg, where he published the first of seven editions of his basic astronomy textbook. Four years later, in 1584, he received the call back to Tubingen.