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In a scientific model typically the phenomena is embedded in a larger nature or reality. Whether we take this at face value or bracket the question of reality, we need to investigate the relations of this theoretically postulated reality to the phenomena, and to the appearances of those phenomena in measurement. But philosophical views of science have largely remained captive to certain criteria of completeness, of which the main remaining contender is the Appearance from Reality Criterion. The greatly changed conception of physical theory at the end of the modern period will challenge this criterion as well.

The use of the term ‘atheist’ to describe sixteenth‐century unbelief can be misleading. Luther was concerned about the doubts about aspects of belief to be found among the people, but most intellectual opponents of the Church became Protestants. The most publicized case was that of Etienne Dolet, seen by later atheists as a martyr and not accepted as such by his Protestant contemporaries, while controversy also surrounded the works of Gerolamo Cardano; François Rabelais, and Francesco Guicciardini. The theories of Copernicus were rejected by Luther but accepted by many Protestant scholars, though they had no impact on the world‐outlook of the Reformation era.

Newton truly did stand on the shoulders of giants whose work prepared the way for modern science. For astronomy and gravity, these were Ptolemy, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler. Their individual characters and idiosyncrasies were essential forces that drove their studies. Their work progressed from a geocentric system in which all heavenly bodies circled the Earth to a heliocentric system in which the planets went around the Sun. The consequences for science, religion, politics, and philosophy were cataclysmic.

Life on the Moon — an old notion — was revived by the astronomical work of Nicolaus Copernicus in the 16th century and the invention of the optical telescope in the early 17th century. Galileo Galilei reluctantly, and Johannes Kepler enthusiastically and in great detail, described lunar life and society using data collected by telescopic observation. Renewed interest in the Moon led to the making of the first detailed lunar maps.

This epilogue sets the Aratean tradition as we have studied it side-by-side with Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium caelestium, showing how Copernicus, as a Renaissance reader of Aratus and the tradition, internalised the language and expression of that tradition in the explanation of a world-view which was very different from that of Aratus, and in time came to dominate it.

This chapter discusses the Scientific Revolution that is dated from the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus's On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543, the work that put the sun rather than the earth at the center of the universe to Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy in 1687, the work that gave the causal underpinnings of the whole system as developed over the previous one hundred and fifty years. Historian Rupert Hall put his finger precisely on the real change that occurred in the revolution. It was not so much the physical theories, although these were massive and important. It was rather a change of metaphors or models—from that of an organism to that of a machine. By the sixteenth century, machines were becoming ever more common and ever more sophisticated. It was natural therefore for people to start thinking of the world—the universe—as a machine, especially since some of the most elaborate of the new machines were astronomical clocks that had the planets and the sun and moon moving through the heavens, not by human force but by predestined contraptions. In a word, by clockwork!

This chapter traces the critical history that has given rise to the notion that Milton’s epic universe accords with the Ptolemaic system. Almost every editor since Newton (1749) has presented us with a geocentric universe, and many modern editors equip that universe with solid spheres, usually with holes in the top to facilitate travel between heaven and earth. Milton’s own text gives very little warrant to this picture: just three lines in a satirical context. Early critics recognized that these lines were a joke and that Milton consigns Ptolemaic spheres to the Paradise of Fools. Early critics also recognized that the shell of Milton’s universe is not the Ptolemaic primum mobile, but a shield against Chaos that Milton took from Lucretius. This chapter argues that the early critics are right and tries to show exactly how and when the critical perception of Milton’s universe went wrong.

This chapter discusses two significant events which are most literally relevant to world-making. These are, first, the series of cosmological and geographical revolutions leading from Ptolemy through Copernicus (On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres, 1543) to Galileo and Newton; second, the circumnavigation of the planet and the European discovery of the Americas, hermetically figured by Magellan (who did not complete his voyage, which ended in 1522) and Christopher Columbus. In subsequent imaginaries, the two events are readily conjoined.

Is the Earth motionless at the center of a finite, star-studded sphere, or is it a planet moving in an annual circuit around the center? Medieval scholastic natural philosophers debated all sorts of imaginative questions of this kind. According to the Pythagoreans, “the center is occupied by fire, and the Earth is one of the stars that creates night and day as it travels in a circle about the center.” Against Ptolemy and Aristotle, Nicolaus Copernicus sketched an alternative theory of gravity that retained the intelligibility of the latter's “natural,” “simple,” and “place” as the right categories in which to describe and explain motion. This book explores why Nicolaus Copernicus concerned himself about the order of the planets when the burgeoning late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth-century heavenly print literature, directed to learned elites and ordinary people alike, was overwhelmingly preoccupied with astrologically driven anticipations of the future, sometimes coupled with powerful apocalyptic fantasies that the world would soon come to an end.

In the fifteenth century, a vast and complex literature described, explained, and invoked the motions of the heavens and their influences on Earth. From the 1470s onward, the learning of the heavens, much of it inherited from the ancient and medieval worlds, began to acquire a new sort of accessibility as it was reproduced in the medium of print. This chapter describes the broad contours of that literature and its various classifications. It shows how those categories evolved, describes how the literature worked as a body of knowledge, and considers the peculiar forms that it took in the sixteenth century. This corpus of writings—rather than an exclusive and autonomous stream of planetary theory—constituted the foundational categories of the intellectual world in which Nicolaus Copernicus was educated at Krakow and Bologna in the 1490s and in which his work took form and was later evaluated. The chapter examines Copernicus's exceptionalism and discusses printing, planetary theory, the genres of forecast, practices of classifying heavenly knowledge and knowledge makers, the science of the stars, and theoretical astrology.

Print, chronic warfare, the growth of towns and cities, and the arrival of syphilis converged in the late fifteenth century to create a new horizon for astrological forecasting. Nicolaus Copernicus's arrival in Bologna to continue his studies in 1496 coincided with these emergent conditions. Violence and insecurity were almost continuous from the French invasion of Italy in 1494 to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. War in the sixteenth century also became, for the first time, an object of widespread study and public comment—largely the province of lawyers, political theorists, historians, and theologians. Although references to warfare were common enough in practical astrology, only rarely did such allusions appear in the genre of astronomical theory. Historiographical emphasis on Regiomontanus and planetary theory is hardly misplaced; but it has tended to make invisible numerous thickets of the culture of prognostication. Printing multiplied and further empowered another extraordinary genre: popular verse prophecies. Popular print prophecy drew many of its most powerful figures, tropes, and typologies from the extraordinarily influential Prognosticatio in Latino of Johannes Lichtenberger.

Nicolaus Copernicus was involved in a culture of astrological prognosticators during his student years in Bologna. Although not a single word about astrology has survived in his writings, a great deal can be said about the specific circumstances that framed his involvement with that subject as a local practice. The four years that Copernicus spent in Bologna were a critical phase of his formative intellectual development. He made the acquaintance of the astronomer Domenico Maria Novara, who first acquainted him with difficulties in Ptolemy's theories, notably an apparent shift in the direction of the terrestrial pole. This anomaly is alleged to have stimulated his own ideas about moving the Earth. Soon after coming to the Bologna studium generale, Copernicus became associated with the senior master of astronomy in a capacity that presupposed astronomical competences in the sphere and theorics acquired during his liberal arts training at Krakow Collegium Maius.

Nicolaus Copernicus first formulated his new arrangement of the heavens amid the intellectual skepticism and political insecurity of the late fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century prognosticatory culture of the northern Italian university towns. Both the Roman Catholic Church and the German Protestant reform movement were obsessed with world-historical biblical prophecies; but for the Lutherans there was a uniquely urgent sense of imminent crisis and belief in an apocalyptic end of the world. On the eve of the Council of Trent, Copernicus's hypotheses quickly became the occasion for discussion and engagement among students of the heavens at Lutheran Wittenberg. The question was no longer merely about whether prognostication of natural events could be accommodated to a Bible-governed narrative, but rather it was about what relevance the Bible had for conflicting hypotheses of celestial order in theoretical astronomy. This chapter explores astrology during the time of Copernicus, along with the concept of the end of the world, the views of Philipp Melanchthon, Georg Joachim Rheticus's Narratio Prima, Andreas Osiander's advice on the publication of De Revolutionibus, and the link between the Holy Scripture and celestial order.

Nicolaus Copernicus's reputation as a learned astronomer was established very quickly in the two decades after the appearance of the Narratio and De Revolutionibus. But De Revolutionibus was not the only resource for disseminating Copernicus's views. After Erasmus Reinhold's Prutenic Tables appeared in 1551, Copernicus's renown within the literature of the heavens became firmly anchored to the domain of practical astronomy, even among constituencies unfamiliar directly with De Revolutionibus itself. From the perspective of the historical agents, there is a simple explanation for this state of affairs: the dominant preoccupation of those who possessed techniques of celestial investigation was the making of knowledge about the future. And in the mid-sixteenth century, those concerns and competences were most powerfully located in the circle of students and scholars gathered around Philipp Melanchthon at Wittenberg. The dominant figures in this Wittenberg movement were Reinhold, Caspar Peucer, and Georg Joachim Rheticus. One significant force shaping the political space of the Melanchthon group was the patronage of the territorial prince, Albrecht Hohenzollern, margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach and duke of Prussia.

Nicolaus Copernicus's name became associated with an optimistic and safe view of prognosticatory practice, especially through the Prutenic Tables. As a resource of astrological forecast, the Wittenberg articulation of Copernican-based tables and mechanisms marked the special confidence of the Melanchthonian wing of the Protestant movement in decoding the divine plan through its manifestations in nature. Philipp Melanchthon and his son-in-law Caspar Peucer allowed the greatest latitude for different kinds of divination; but Martin Luther was much more wary than Melanchthon about any sort of prophecy that was not exclusively based on the Bible and other sacred texts. This chapter explores the boundary between divine and demonic divination—the perilous divide on which hardy mid-century defenders of astrology's credibility balanced their goals. It also focuses on Giuliano Ristori of Prato (1492–1556) and his prognostication of the early death of Alessandro, illegitimate son of Lorenzo de'Medici the Younger, soon to become ruler of the Florentine Republic (1530); John Dee's contacts with Gemma Frisius and other Louvain mathematical practitioners of the 1540s; and Jofrancus Offusius's novel effort to contain the Piconian challenge.

By the mid-sixteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church was deeply preoccupied with affirming its traditional authority against the culturally and politically fragmenting effects of the “German Schism.” Nicolaus Copernicus's theory as he expounded in De Revolutionibus was not discussed at the Council of Trent. The contrast with Copernicus's reception in Wittenberg—at precisely the same moment—could not have been more striking. The Florentine Dominican Giovanni Maria Tolosani's appraisal was the first polemic against Copernicus. Unlike Andreas Osiander, who tried to protect Copernicus's work by stressing the separation between the mathematical and the physical parts of astronomy, Tolosani brought out the dependency of astronomy on the higher disciplines of physics and theology for the truth of its conclusions. This chapter deals with foreknowledge, skepticism, and celestial order in Rome. It also discusses the Holy Index and the science of the stars, along with astrology, astronomy, and the certitude of mathematics in post-Tridentine heavenly science. Finally, it looks at Christopher Clavius of Bamberg and his views on the order of the planets.

This chapter explores the four defining documents, namely the Inquisition's Sentence (1633), Galileo's Abjuration, the Index's Anti-Copernican Decree, and the Index's Correction of Copernicus' Revolutions, in order to understand the condemnation of Galileo and the controversy it generated. Galileo had been found guilty of “vehement suspicion of heresy.” This notion embodies the complexity of the theological concept of heresy and of the Inquisition's antiheretical practices. It is also crucial to note that two suspected heresies were being attributed to Galileo. The sentence had declared Galileo to be a suspected heretic; the abjuration here repeated this characterization. The chapter then investigates the corrections to Copernicus' Revolutions published on 15 May 1620, and sees whether they may have softened or otherwise clarified the situation by spelling out the conditions under which that book could be read and, by implication, what aspect of the doctrine was not condemned or prohibited.

Maciej Miechowita was the first European humanist to challenge Ptolemy’s description of Eastern Europe’s borderlands and to broadly promote the use of the word “continent.” His influential Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis Asiana et Europiana et de contentis in eis (1517) became foundational for subsequent mapmakers and writers such as Sebastian Münster, Abraham Ortelius, and Richard Hakluyt. The author of the first printed history of Poland and the owner of Poland’s largest map collection, Miechowita published his Tractatus as an exploration of the boundaries between Europe and Asia through the lens of cartography, philology, and etymology. Dwelling on the origin of the Ptolemaic term of Sarmatia as a region bridging Europe and Asia, Miechowita charts his interrogation of continental boundaries as an exploration of manifold, at times competing, models of space, migration, and translatio studii. The Tractatus epitomizes how different frameworks of conceiving Europe’s boundaries coexisted and redirected continental thinking in a time of territorial discoveries—not only in the west, but also in the east.