The Book Nobody Read

by Owen Gingerich

  This is where the matter stood until 1998, almost three decades into my census research. Then, unexpectedly, a rather interesting second-edition De revolutionibus appeared in London. Paul Quarrie, who was aware of my investigations ever since I had turned up at Eton to inspect its two first editions while he was librarian there, had in the meantime become Sotheby's rare book expert. He alerted me to the volume, which had been consigned to Sotheby's, and when I inspected it, I was able to point to a special feature of that copy. When Petreius finished printing the book proper, he immediately printed an errata leaf with the errors on the first 280 pages of the 400-page book. There is a logical explanation why Petreius printed only the first part of the errata. I am guessing that when the last pages went through the press, the corrections for the final part hadn't yet been returned from Copernicus, so on the errata leaf he printed what he had and that was that. Later the remaining corrections came to hand but were never printed, although a few insiders in Wittenberg got access to them. In the course of compiling the census I had found seven copies in which the errors were hand-corrected all the way to the end of the book, not just on the first 280 pages given on the printed errata leaf. The De revolutionibus at Sotheby's was an eighth copy with the errata marked all the way to the end.

  Paul Quarrie carefully described the book in the auction catalog. He mentioned a characteristic comment on folio 96 that I had recorded in several of the other copies. This was a rather interesting marginalium alongside the place where Copernicus raised the question whether it was the Sun that was the center of the universe or the center of the Earth's orbit, the place in the text that Kepler and Maestlin must have specifically discussed.

  I coveted the copy coming up in the auction, but I didn't have the cash to back up a winning bid. It went to a French collector who wasn't particularly interested in annotations, so by and by I offered him my own copy of the second edition plus a cash premium in order to make an exchange. We rendezvoused at a modest French restaurant near Place Den-fert Rochereau in Paris, had a pleasant conversation about book collecting, and consummated the swap. I carried my acquisition over to the nearby Observatoire de Paris and showed it to Alain Segonds, a colleague who had been unusually helpful with the census. Then I took a closer look at the annotation on folio 96, and I was stunned.

  An annotation copied from Rheticus' original note, possibly by his assistant Valentin Otto, author's collection.

  In my previous inspection of the book and in glancing at the transcription in the Sotheby's auction catalog, I had simply assumed that the annotation matched several in the other, related copies. What I hadn't noticed was that the annotation was in the first person. It read, "We touched on this in our Narratio but my teacher skipped over it," and the note was specifically attributed to Georg Joachim Rheticus. It was not in Rheticus' hand, but it was surely a verbatim copy from Rheticus' own De revolutionibus. I hadn't found Rheticus' own book, but here was a transcription of his sparse notes and his list of corrections, including a few not found in the other copies with the extended errata list. The second edition had been published in 1566, and several years later Valentin Otto had gone to Hungary to work with Rheticus, so quite possibly what I now have is a copy Otto made at that time. Alas, Rheticus' annotations, at least those transcribed into my copy, scarcely offer intriguing insights, at least not the way Maestlin's or Kepler's marginalia do. Rheticus clearly understood the astronomy at a deep level, but it seems he lost interest in following up on the technical details, and the copy of his annotations shows that only too vividly.

  Did Rheticus dust off his interest in heliocentric astronomy when his young visitor arrived? Who can guess what stories the sixty-year-old Joachim told the thirty-year-old Valentin about his own apprenticeship a quarter century earlier with the master cosmologist? In those bygone days Copernicus and Rheticus must have discussed astronomy, medicine, student days in Italy—and possibly even astrology.

  * Whether any of the other copies included these three errors was hard ro know, since I didn't have microfilms of all of rhem, and in the first instance of examining the books these errors would have escaped notice as being so seemingly innocuous. As in most good mystery stories, minor details assume great importance only in rerrospect. It turned out that a copy in Edinburgh also had these errors marked—even more thoroughly than the copy in Debrecen.

  * Johannes Franciscus is simply a longer form of Jofrancus.

  † The use of a geographic identifier was very popular in sixteenth-century central Europe, and nearly all the srudents matricularing at Wittenberg or Leipzig signed in with one.

  * The note in the Yale copy connecting Hagecius and Wittich is in the hand of Johannes Praetorius, who in 1576 had become professor of mathemarics at Altdorf, a town just east of Nuremberg. In some way he had gotten the information from Thaddeus Hagecius, a man with broad asrronomical interests and connections in the courtly circles of Prague. No De revolutionibus with a Hagecius provenance has turned up, but it is tempting to think that at some point he might have owned the Edinburgh copy with the Of­fusius notes and that he showed it to Wittich.

  Chapter 12

  PLANETARY INFLUENCES

  DURING THE great Copernican Quinquecentennial of 1973, two distinguished scholars had been assigned a private limousine to get them from Warsaw to Copernicus' birthplace, Torun. Edward Rosen, the dean of Copernican studies, and Willy Hartner, Europe's leading historian of the exact sciences, emerged from the car no longer on speaking terms. Hartner had had the audacity to suggest that Copernicus and Rheticus could have discussed astrology. After all, in the Narratio prima Rheticus had entitled one section "The kingdoms of the world change with the motion of the eccentric" and added that "this small circle is in truth the Wheel of Fortune." Surely, he would not have included the statement without having talked about it with his mentor. To Rosen the very idea of such a conversation was anathema. To him Copernicus was the model modern scientist, unpolluted by such notions as planetary influences.

  By today's historiography, of course, Rosen's view was hopelessly anachronistic. Copernicus lived in an era when astrological ideas permeated academia. The astronomy curriculum was designed to teach advanced students the use of planetary tables so that they could calculate the positions of planets needed for constructing a horoscope that would show the aspects of the sky at a patron's birth. Cracow University had two astronomy professors, one in the arts faculty and the other in the medical faculty, the latter expressly for teaching the doctors-to-be how to use the stars for medical prognostications. Domenico Maria Novara, the astronomer with whom Copernicus boarded while he studied law in Bologna, published annual astrological prognostications, something Copernicus could scarcely have ignored. And when he returned to Italy to study medicine at Padua, he surely was exposed to more astrological thinking.

  A century and a half earlier Geoffrey Chaucer had spiced his Canterbury Tales and his Troilus and Crysede with planetary configurations that held keys to the twists of fate in his stories, and if anything, the astrological ethos had only intensified since his time. Even today our language contains fossil remnants of a sidereal and planetary vocabulary: consider, ascendancy, disaster, jovial, martial, venereal, mercurial, saturnine, not to mention the names of the days of the week.*

  Copernicus was born 19 February 1473 at 4:48 P.M. This fact would probably be unknown to us except that it is preserved in an early manuscript horoscope found in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich. It seems unlikely that Copernicus' mother had a clock beside the birthing bed or that the time would have been recorded so accurately. In fact, Renaissance astrology guides point out that the first step in constructing a horoscope was usually to retrodict the time of the client's birth. An elaborate process of deducing the moment of conception by examining the phase of the Moon nine months earlier, and then working forward in time, theoretically allowed the astrologer to construct the missing information. Since a critical feature of each horoscope is the degree of the zodiac th
at was just rising at the moment of birth (the so-called ascendant), and because this changes on average every four minutes, a fairly precise time of birth is required. The chances are extremely high that Copernicus' birth moment was simply calculated,†

  All the available biographical information on Rheticus reveals his passion for astrology. Curiously, there is not a shred of evidence that Copernicus had any interest in the subject, even though he could hardly have avoided learning the standard rules of its practice. Given the ethos of the times, Rheticus and Copernicus must certainly have discussed the topic. Copernicus was surely not naive; he must have realized that astrologers would constitute a good fraction of the market for his treatise.

  The horoscope for Copernicus that establishes the astronomer's birthday. Bayerische Staatshibliothek, Munich, Cod. Lat. #27003, folio 33 verso.

  WELL IN TUNE with the realities of the sixteenth century was Rene Taylor, director of the art museum in Ponce, Puerto Rico, who had come to me with an unusual request several years before my Copernicus chase began. Could I draw up a horoscope for the laying of the cornerstone of the Escorial Palace north of Madrid, an event that took place on the Feast of St. George in April 1563? I was naturally curious as to what lay behind his request. It turned out that he had a list of books in the library of Juan de Herrera, architect of the Escorial. There were few books on architecture but many on magic, astrology, and astronomy. Taylor figured that Herrera would naturally have used astrology to choose the time of day, and perhaps even the day itself, for the cornerstone ceremony. Because I was then in my spare time computing planetary positions from ancient Babylonian times to the present, I figured I could easily help him test his hypothesis.

  Little did I then appreciate that every major Renaissance astrologer seemed to have his own way of dividing up the sky into the so-called astrological houses. Furthermore, for historical studies it was necessary to know not where the planets really were but where the astrologers thought they were (which was often quite another thing). In agreeing to help Taylor, I got myself in deeper than I had intended, but eventually I came up with a credible sixteenth-century horoscope, and I helped Taylor find a real astrologer, someone with a genuine thirteenth-century mind,* to interpret it and to convince him that the time and day were deliberately selected to be astrologically propitious.

  Herrera's library had included not one but two examples of Copernicus' De revolutionibus. After my quest began, I looked forward to the opportunity to inspect them in the Escorial itself, and in 1977 I finally had the occasion to visit the splendid library with the astronomical frescoes that had been at the heart of Taylor's researches. In the course of chasing after copies of Copernicus' book, Miriam and I had visited some spectacularly decorated rooms. The library at the Melk Abbey in Austria comes to mind, as do both the Strakhov Monastery and the Clementinum in Prague. The original reading room of the Vatican Library is pretty grand as well, and the Osterreichische Nationalbiblio-thek in Vienna is close to being in the same league. Alas, we didn't actually sit in any of these wonderful spaces, including the Escorial, to study De revolutionibus. Those ornate halls now function as art galleries, and the reading rooms are not so stately. So for total experience, the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Duke Humphrey's Library at the Bodleian in Oxford take the laurels.

  Still, we took a special delight in actually seeing the Escorial images. The vaulted 175-foot-long arcade provided space for strategically positioned showcases of rare books and manuscripts as well as an ornate armillary sphere, and the hall was lined with Herrera's specially designed bookcases of ebony, cedar, orangewood, and walnut. The frescoes individually were not particularly memorable art—the conservative King Philip II, patron of the palace, placed the flamboyant paintings by El Greco elsewhere—but the total effect in the hall was stunning. The arched panels depict the seven liberal arts, beginning with Grammar and Rhetoric at one end, Logic, Arithmetic, and Music in the central three vaults, and Geometry and Astronomy curving over the armillary sphere. There in the bay for Astronomia is Alfonso the Great, patron of the astronomical tables that Reinhold's Copernican-based Tabulae Prutenicae ultimately replaced in the mid-sixteenth century. Facing Alfonso on the other side of the arcade is Euclid, and like the Castillian monarch, he holds astronomical symbols that, according to Taylor, were connected to the horoscope of Philip II. And under the bay is another astronomical fresco, with Dionysius the Areopagite observing the eclipse at Christ's passion.*

  The main gallery of the Escorial Library, with itsfrescoes of the seven liberal arts.

  The library itself holds one of the world's largest collections of medieval manuscripts, being surpassed only by the Vatican's holdings. In the austere reading room I took a look at the library's copies of De revolutionibus. Its first edition is in a green pigskin binding blind-stamped with the arms of Philip II—that is, an impressed but uncolored design. Apparently the king had bought the copy early on, in 1545 when he was eighteen. He didn't write in it, and there is no way to know if he actually read it. The king was a formidable collector of books, and this one became part of a gift of more than 4,500 volumes he presented to the Escorial monastery library in 1576.1 was disappointed not to find direct evidence there of either of the copies Juan de Herrera was known to have owned. The Escorial suffered a horrendous fire in 1671, and if Herrera's volumes were first editions, they might have perished then. There are, however, two unattributed copies of the second edition in the Escorial collection. If the two copies Herrera owned were of the 1566 Basel edition (entirely possible, for he was also collecting books after that time), one or both of these copies now in the Esco­rial might have originally belonged to the architect and escaped the fire. We will probably never know whether the Escorial architect actually read the Copernican tome, because these copies have no annotations, and I never found any other copy associated with him.

  As I EXAMINED many annotations in libraries throughout Europe and North America, virtually always in Latin, I gradually learned to distinguish between various national writing styles. But no matter the nationality, there are both neat, lucidly legible hands and some so messy or idiosyncratic that reading them provides a test of wit and patience. One sprawl on a title page in the National Library in Rome turned out to be relevant to astrology, but for many days it defied both me and my colleague Jerzy Dobrzycki as we tried to decipher it. Early one morning, when I was still half asleep in bed, the reading came to me. Many seemingly brilliant insights occur when I'm in such a semiconscious state, only to dissolve into triviality in the clear light of dawn, but this rare exception rang true. Dobrzycki was visiting me at the time, and he expressed considerable skepticism that I had managed to crack the inscription, but he was soon obliged to concede. I was quite pleased with my success, since I could so seldom best him at a Latin transcription. The phrase read, " Vidit P. Rd Inquisitor inde Corrigatur si qua erant astrono-miae judiciare die 2 apl 1597" (The Reverend Father Inquisitor saw it so that it would be corrected if there were any judicial astrology, on 2 April 1597). In other words, the book passed muster because it contained no astrology. Ed Rosen would have been very pleased.

  Sometimes an annotation in a cryptic hand seemed almost impossible to decipher. For example, Dobrzycki and I puzzled for a long time over the following note in a copy of De revolutionibus at the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg (here considerably enlarged).

  We recognized the third symbol in the first long line under the name Ty­cho Brahe as the letter p with a horizontal bar through the tail, the standard Latin abbreviation for per, but what came next baffled us. I finally showed it to Emmanuel Poulle, the distinguished French paleographer who had helped in many ways with the census, and he almost instantly read it as "At nos per Veneris stellam multo certius hoc negotium observavimus alioquin Luna,* etc." With that I felt rather like a kindergartner, for Jerzy and I had often encountered the planetary symbols in the notes, but in this context we had totally missed the traditional symbol for
Venus. These symbols are tiny planetary logos, depicting a recognizable characteristic of each member of the Greco-Roman planetary pantheon:

  The symbols for the five naked-eye planets are given here in their traditional order, beginning with Mercury with its truncated caduceus, the serpent-entwined staff of the swift messenger of the gods. Venus' mirror is obvious (the second symbol), as is the spear and shield of Mars (the third). Jupiter's symbol is a stylized thunderbolt, while Saturn's is the scythe of Father Time (the last in the row).

  In hindsight, the printing methods of the 1970s that I considered for the Census in its early stages seem very primitive by today's standards. Many entries were typed and retyped by my secretary as additional details and identifications became available. Although today I can hardly remember what a Spinwriter is, for some years it was the device of choice for a reasonably legible computer printout. In retrospect, some of the world's ugliest books since the invention of printing with movable type were produced in that decade.

  As larger and faster computers arrived on the scene, computer-typesetting became an everyday reality. Then I realized that for the typography of the Census I would need the symbols both for the planets and for the signs of the zodiac—zodiacal signs because astronomers in those days frequently designated astronomical longitudes by a system in which the ecliptic* was divided into twelve equal segments of thirty degrees, for example V 14°. Here the symbol for Aries derives from the horns of the Ram. I wanted my Census to have symbols that reflected their historical roots, so I commissioned the California typographer Kris Holmes to add these characters as well as the planetary symbols to her Lucida computer font. I sent her images from sixteenth-century astronomical tables, and here is the typography we agreed on.